jennifer wilson: wanna grow? employ the 10% x three rule
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the disruptors
with liz farr for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间
jennifer wilson has been advising and coaching firms on better ways to run their firms for years, so she has had an inside view of how firms perform well or perform badly. wilson said that building a sustainable firm that attracts and retains the best people and that the younger generation wants to own will require changes from how many traditional firms have operated.
more: mike whitmire: re-think your hiring and training practices | hector garcia: success strategies of a quickbooks youtube superstar | blake oliver: why tax work yearns to be free| private equity explodes in u.k. | brannon poe: the status quo must go | accounting nerds, unlock your super powers | disruptor: jason statts shakes up the status quo | think small to think big with matt wilkinson | when financial statements go extinct with corey schmidt | can geraldine carter save accountants from themselves? | re-inventing accounting with tyler anderson
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though firms quickly switched to remote work at the pandemic’s peak to create a culture of “anytime, anywhere work,” many are now moving backward. some firms are giving wishy-washy messages about returning to the office, which makes remote team members feel they have little chance of promotion. “smart firms are not rolling backward right now,” wilson said. they are finding ways to do “mass customization and personalization of schedules and workplaces” to make everything work for team members, work for clients and work for the firm.
this may mean making tough decisions to let clients or underperforming staff go.
pro members always get all the top takeaways, details on the guest, and the full transcript.
“nothing builds trust and respect more than demonstrating to your people that you’re going to live by the values and vision of the organization.” even if a partner is a rainmaker, if they don’t treat staff well, despite coaching and support to change, they need to go as well, she said. team members will be grateful and impressed.
“all of these changes are coming, whether firm leaders are going to be proactive about them or not. so if they’re not proactive, their best and brightest will be gone,” she cautioned. otherwise, wilson said, it will not be a sustainable business. leadership should empower younger team members to make the changes that seem too hard to make.
more takeaways from jennifer wilson:
- if we want people to stay in the profession, we have to give them hope that the work will become more meaningful and joyful and less arduous than we’ve allowed it to become. we must give the younger generation the belief that they can help shape the profession’s future.
- to keep the younger generation, firm leaders need to do whatever it takes to keep those younger people in their firms. that may include giving them control so the younger people can build a more sustainable firm and one that they want to own.
- one reason firm leaders are reluctant to change or hand over control is that they are still making great money, adhering to the mindset, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”
- firm owners who are successfully moving into the new paradigm involve younger people in putting together a vision for the future firm. they are willing to make investments to create those firms and to explore new business models to create firms that the younger generation will be interested in owning.
- now that people can work from anywhere, big city firms are snapping up talented people from rural areas and paying them more. firms in those rural areas will struggle to pay competitive salaries unless they expand their thinking and court clients outside of their local geography.
- working long hours has become a tradition, a red badge of courage, and we share our martyred stories with pride. but for the younger generation, this sounds as appealing as digging ditches, especially when there’s little transparency about how much money can be made as an accountant.
- we can make choices to run our firms in more balanced ways. change our business processes and extend more returns. do more work in the summer to even out the workflow. work with fewer clients who share the same deadlines and raise our fees. we can choose to build the kind of firm and the lifestyle we want.
- consider non-traditional staffing models. not everyone needs to be a cpa to do the work. dynamic staffing models that use offshoring, outsourcing, part-time or remote workers – or all of these – can adjust capacity as needed. “there’s very little in the actual workflow of the service delivery, that requires the five-year degree and the cpa license.” be open to people who are skilled at operations or manipulating and analyzing data.
- consider the 10% times three rule: increase client fees by 10%, increase employee compensation by 10%, and fire 10% of your clients. making sure your team knows which clients are being fired will bring hope to the firm.
- generosity is the number one attribute firms should look for in people and be willing to cultivate. generosity contributes to the success of an organization, while selfishness contributes to its dysfunction. most company plans incentivize billing and business development more over mentoring and people development.
more about jennifer wilson
jennifer wilson is a partner and co-founder of convergencecoaching, llc, which specializes in helping individuals, teams, firms, and associations in the public accounting profession change their mindsets and behaviors, create innovative visions for their futures and develop new skills, habits, and structures to produce transformative results. wilson was a partner at bdo where she ran the national financial solutions group practice with nearly 100 consultants providing financial systems consulting services to clients. additionally, she was a vice president of sales and customer service for sage software (formerly sota). she’s a member of the consultants’ trust, new horizon’s group, cpa firm management association, aicpa, association for accounting marketing, american marketing association, and the forbes coaching council. she can be reached at convergencecoaching.com.
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
liz farr 0:03
welcome to accounting disrupter conversations. i’m your host, liz far from 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. my guest today is jennifer wilson, partner and co-founder of convergence coaching. how are you today?
jennifer wilson 0:19
oh, liz. i’m good. and i’m so glad to be here to talk with you about disruption.
liz farr 0:24
yes. well, i also want to congratulate you for making the cut for some of the most powerful women in accounting. congratulations on that.
jennifer wilson 0:36
thank you. that’s awesome. there are so many wonderful, influential and change making women in the profession. it’s, you know, humbling and astounding to be named to a shortlist like that, because they’re just, i can’t imagine how you even make a list.
liz farr 0:55
yeah, yeah. i’ve had a few of them on this podcast. so yes, i they are wonderful women. well, we’ve got a lot to cover. so let’s jump in. great. let’s do accounting talent in the us and around the world has been scarce for years, and covid made it worse. what are some ideas that you have on how to make things better?
jennifer wilson 1:23
well, gosh, you know, yes, there have been challenges with retention of talent in our profession. really, since the dawn of time, we have notoriously kind of turned over the senior, let’s say, maybe a quarter of those that get to that three year point, bounce out in the olden days, i think it’s a much higher number today. you know, i think if we want people to stay in the profession, we have to give them hope, that we will change the business model that we will make the work more, both meaningful, but also joyful, less toil, than then we make it out to be and that we’ve allowed it to become, i think we have to have them believe that they can help shape the future of whatever it is for their firm. and that the traditionalists or those that are closer to retirement are not going to influence the future of the firm in such a way that they aren’t going to be able to make it their own. and, and i think right now, there’s a lot of concern about sustainability, these firms. and i think if you wanted all your young people to really believe you were serious, and that they should stay and, and see this through, you would make sure they understood that you were willing to do whatever it takes including step aside and give up control even so that they could create a firm that was sustainable, and that they felt like owning.
liz farr 2:56
i agree with you completely there. i worked in firms where the old guard was really set in their ways. and it just floored me how how dysfunctional and how dissatisfying it was to work there. you know, what are what are some ideas that you’ve seen from firms that you’ve worked with, and creative things that they’ve done?
jennifer wilson 3:26
yeah, and i, you know, i’ll go back really quick to something you just said there, liz. and that is, you know, this idea of just sort of holding on. and there’s a lot of reasons we hold on. those of us that are already in power, let’s say are already in ownership, we’re already having equity and decision making. we hold on because we’re afraid of change, we hold on, because maybe we’re uncertain about what sort of changes to make. we also hold on because right now in our profession, there’s a lot of money being made. and so it feels like hey, man, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. and why would i leave this or handed over to you when i am making such great money? so, you know, you could call that selfish interest or even the tiniest bit of greed that might have us hold on or hoard the power of change. and so, you know, you ask the question, what are firms doing that are that are, you know, headed into this sort of new paradigm. and the first thing they’re doing is they’re involving young people, and putting together a vision or a future future, the firm strategies that allow those future leaders to really influence where we had and then they’re being willing to explore significant business model changes and also investments that are going to have to be made. now, while those traditional or you know, current leaders are in place, they’ll have to make the investments to build this firm in the future so that the rest of the team that was coming up, want to own it. and, you know, it’s, it’s changes like really becoming an anytime, anywhere workplace. so, you know, firms made sort of the turn on a dime. most firms when the pandemic hit two, remote work, they sent their people home so we could be healthy, the clients didn’t want visitors anyway. so it was easy for us to become more flexible and more more remote or any where work. and our people were having to care for their children and their parents and their new dogs and cats that they got during the pandemic. and so we were flexible with them. we were like, hey, man, whatever you need. this is a crisis. and we’re all in it together. and so we created this very flexible feeling. most firms, and some already had that in place, they didn’t need the pandemic to hit, they knew they were going to need to be at anytime, anywhere workplace, they already had their people working from wherever was best at the times that were best, you know, those firms just kept rolling forward. but other firms made that leap. and i kept telling those firms hey, man, you have caught up to where these other firms have been getting to for years, you’re right there don’t go backward. well, now is you know, people are talking about return to the office or rto. and they’re talking about rto percentages, what percentage of your staff is rto. and they’re, and they’re giving wishy washy messages to their people, they might have even hired people outside of their geography. they have remote workers in other states. but now they’re saying things like, we’ve got to get back to the office two to three times a week or whatever they’re saying, it’s giving such a weird mixed message there remote people are like, whoa, it feels like the firm’s moving in the wrong direction for me to have a chance to be promoted here and have a real career. and there are people that liked anytime, anywhere work, are really sad at the prospect that it’ll go away. so smart firms are not rolling backward right now. or even in neutral, giving strange signals. they’re rolling completely forward on anytime, anywhere work and saying, hey, we’re gonna go all the way there. and we’re going to make your work work for you and work for our clients and work for the farm. and we’re going to do mass customization and personalization of schedules and workplaces and, and just make it work. and i think that’s a just a
liz farr 7:46
huge one. yeah, yeah. and i think back to people that i’ve talked to over the last five or six years who were remote already, and that seemed sort of revolutionary at the time, that and freeing for them to because they were not dependent on the talent in their geographical area. and then they were also not dependent on just the clients in their areas. so they could work with anybody anywhere, they could build a specialty niche firm that just served designers, or micro breweries, or restaurants or franchises or something like that. and they could be the go to accounting firm for that. you know, i don’t know why anybody wouldn’t do that.
jennifer wilson 8:49
well, i mean, i think that you have to have be sort of attached to the three dimensional paradigm in the impersonal paradigm, to not be able to see how freeing that borderless reach approach to growth of clients and team members would be there are firms around the country lives that that are kind of in small towns with small clients that want to pay small rates. and, and their people can today work anywhere. there are firms all over the country that want to hire those, those talented staff members or team members at you know, big city rates. so those firms feel sort of hamstrung, they’re like, gosh, we’re so stuck by our geography. we can’t raise fees. we can’t get rates per hour the way we need them to and, and yet, we’re going to have to raise salaries and i’m like, you’re, you’re thinking too parochially and too small. you’re thinking all you can do is do business on main street america. you can expand your client base you can go outside your geography for those clients and, and work with clients of the of the type and the of the culture and who need the services that you most want. to serve, that’s a that’s a way to grow is to identify ideal target client, really understand psychographically. and then you know demographically who they are, you mentioned a number of of options and identifying who those ideal targets are, what sort of service you really want to deliver, that you love delivering not the services that you think you have to deliver that were always delivered at this firm, you know, since the dawn of time, the ones we believe in and care about and that we’re interested in. and that we think there’s a market for and that people will pay for her and value. we get to make those decisions, we don’t have to say, well, my geography won’t let it or our clients won’t get there. we can say those things, that’s a great way to resist change, but they’re false. they’re actually false. they’re, there’s truth in them, but they, they’re self limiting statements. and we can choose more progressive ways of thinking, broader ways of thinking, we have to break down mental boundaries, and really just stop, you know, look at what am i attached to here? you know, there’s lots of options available to firms and that kind of opportunities exciting to future, you know, leaders, they really are, they could get behind that and see, man, i can build a firm i really love.
liz farr 11:22
yeah, instead of being in a firm that i can sort of tolerate working.
jennifer wilson 11:29
yes, or even like, a firm that looks like it’s stuck in a, in a conversation or paradigm that isn’t fun. and i’m worried about our profession. i mean, there’s a number of things that keep me up at night, but one of them is, you know, we’ve always like traditionally, i i’ve teased and said more than the red badge of courage about hours, right, you know, and that was the worst busy season and 34 years, you know, i had to work easter weekend or i, you know, i put in 3200 hours last year, and i had do and, you know, we have all these like i walked uphill both ways and waist high snows stories that we tell about what it is to work, you know, man, this busy season crushed me. and i haven’t see this, by the way, i see progressive, young cpas out in twitter, saying that kind of stuff about busy season, and i’m like, oh, this is such a tradition, such a, i don’t know what to say about it, like a martyred sort of way of communicating about what we’re up to. that sounds like ditch digging to young people. and i worry about high schoolers, and i worry about college kids hearing that that’s what this is, i’m going to get a master’s. and i’m gonna, you know, take the hardest exam there is to pass professionally. and then i’m going to work like a ditch digging dog. you know, what, then? no, we’re not very transparent about the money people are making, which is awesome money right now, on the, you know, on the firm side, and, you know, it’s just right now the pr is poor at best. and we need a major branding makeover. at the firm level, you know, some people are like, well, the aicpa needs to advertise it, fix the brand. and i’m like, no, they could never advertise to undo what we’re doing to erode the brand, by making it feel like such drudgery.
liz farr 13:28
yeah, you know, i remember back when i was working on my masters of accounting, now, i came into accounting kind of late in life, i was about 40. and i signed up with a mentor, who told me about an audit she was on where she was there for some 30 hours straight on the job. she said, i went home in the middle to take a shower. and then i went back, and i thought, good, god, what am i getting myself into here? do i really want to do this?
jennifer wilson 14:08
this isn’t law enforcement. and this isn’t neurosurgery. and yes, yes. yes. there are some components, like if you’re, if you’re doing transaction, you know, merger, merger and acquisition, transaction work, and yes, that could be sort of 24 by seven and yes, i do need to answer my phone and i have to be available on text and, and that does go on, you know, 24 by seven for a week or so while or a couple of weeks while we’re putting the deal together. and if i sign up for that kind of work, yes. it could be that ridiculous that 30 hours in a row, i guess. but there’s so little in our profession that’s like that. this is supposed to be a profession that is balanced and you know, that where we can integrate our life and work and, and so it’s just it’s strange because if you ask ask people what they value about the work, they would say, well, i value that i can really, you know, i have sometimes great summers, you know, or they have these balance stories, but if you really dig into the way they make it look. and some of that’s, you know, they can blame regulators or they can blame the the due dates or the seasonality all behind that, but we could change business processes, we could extend more, we could do more work in the summer, even out the work. you know, we could not, you know, do business with all the clients that all want the same deadlines. we can, there’s so many things that we can do, we can raise fees, and have fewer clients, you know, we can, we could choose, i have one client that just recently exited their tax practice. now, that’s, you know, that’s a big, you know, others exit accounting or audit, right? so, i’m not saying one, one is a better exit than another. but you can make these decisions that, you know, like, what do we want to be known for? what do we want our life to be like? what kind of clients do we want to serve? what do we want those clients to feel like to work on? you know? and if they don’t value us, and if they’re all, you know, trying to get us to do tons of work and a very tight timeframe with limited capacity, then, then let’s figure out how to change that. and we can change it. we’re not we don’t have to be victim to the business models of the past?
liz farr 16:35
no, no. and speaking of business models, you know, the accounting firms had been using the same business model for decades, is a billable hour, and a very rigid hierarchy for their org charts. what are some of the things that you are seeing firms do differently? oh, man,
jennifer wilson 17:01
tons, tons, i’ll say a few things. one is, so you know, no surprise or shock. cpas are, you know, not plentiful. so we are out there searching for people and trying to staff using all the same staffing methods, you know, and saying things like, well, you have to have your cpa license to become a manager. and we can only do these jobs with cpas. and so number one business model chant change that we would advocate is non traditional staffing, or non traditional capacity planning. and what i try to get firms to think about is dynamic staffing. so i could turn staff on and off like, or turn capacity on or off like a faucet, we sell a lot we can turn on and get more capacity, things are a little slower, we can reduce the flow of capacity. so things like offshoring, outsourcing, fractional part time, certainly remote is part part of the non traditional, non certified folks, i, there’s very little very little in the actual workflow of the service delivery, that requires the five year degree and the cpa license in truth. and so being open to ea is being open to really good operational administrators being open to people that are incredible with excel. and they can, you know, they can manipulate data, they can pull data down and really do wonderful data models, but they’re not accounting grads, and they’re not, you know, they’re not trying to get their letters and maybe they would get their letters after they come into our firm and work in, in our workflows, and they just get motivated and want to do that. but we don’t have to have that traditional, we’re going after five year accounting grads, we’re gonna you know, they have to become certified, we’re going to message that relentlessly. and and have sort of the haves and have nots, those that are certified who are, you know, sort of eligible for growth and development in our business and those that are not which your product had stock and, and we use the word just well, she’s just an accountant, or she’s just an administrator, or she’s just part time. we can’t be having that we have to, we have to, like blow up our original ways of thinking about staffing. and that’s business model. number one, if you don’t change that, we keep ditch digging, because right now we have work in firms than we have the capacity to serve it. and what that means is people are feeling overwhelmed. they’re not feeling like they’re winning. they don’t feel like they’re delivering the quality. they’re not getting the depth of relationship with clients, they can’t go deep enough. and this is at every level, even the partners are overwhelmed and don’t feel like they’re going deep enough with clients. and there’s so much more clients could use from us, you know, so we’ve got our address capacity for us to be able to keep people because no nobody wants to operate in an overwhelmed i’m not winning mode on a, a forever and ever basis. so that’s one. that’s one biggie.
liz farr 20:12
that that is a huge one, just changing the staffing. now i know you mentioned turning the flow on and off. would that just be with offshoring and outsourcing hiring temp work when you need it?
jennifer wilson 20:30
yes, yes, it is. and it’s also though, like recognizing, if you leverage properly and so most organizations, most firms they don’t, they aren’t really measuring and, and paying for leverage, okay, so there’s a lot of people working at the wrong levels in the firm. but if you leverage properly, you’ll have a lot of work at the bottom, that doesn’t really require the accounting degree. and so if we ended up selling more project work, or more even advisory or consulting work, you can hire really great administrators or operational people to come in and provide significant leverage in the client interface and collecting client data, loading things to the portal setting up, you know, binders or setting up client work papers, or, you know, whatever it is, there’s tons of things that those folks could do for us. and they’re easier to hire lists. so if all of a sudden our sales pipeline is plumping, and right now, it should be because glide across this country needs cpa firm help, and they aren’t being able to get the responsiveness from their current provider or, or just, they would love to have more options. and so we might be able to sell a lot more, if we knew that we could staff. now, we’ve always subscribed to something called the hire ahead model, which is staff and then sell and, and that if you’re any good and delivering any quality work, and really have good advice to provide clients that you’ll always be able to sell into your capacity. but yes, by dynamic capacity, i mean, just getting the confidence to know if the opportunities are, are there or where or we want to go down a new service line or a new industry, we know that we have the skills to staff, because we have all these options for places to go for resource. and firms have to figure out how to do that. it’s it’s easier said than done, it can totally be done. but there’s got to be subsystem isation, some clear documented processes, you can’t just outsource and say, hey, you know, it’s the wild wild west do it however you want to over there, we’ll accept whatever you give us and figure out how to deal with it, you know, there has to be, you know, good consistent process and workflow and, obviously, good project management and, and, you know, good communication and all those things in place. and so there’s some investment, to build the capacity to turn the faucet on and off. once you do that, you should be able to turn it on and off as needed.
liz farr 23:11
yeah, and i completely agree with the need for setting up systems in standard processes. now, at one firm i was at, we did that we had a method for doing a tax return, we had a set of workpapers, sort of a template that we used, and that made the prep easy it made it yes, it made reviewing easy, and it was much harder to make big mistakes. yes, and and it was really easy to train people to because we could just hand them the document that says, here’s the recipe for how you do this. and it was much easier.
jennifer wilson 24:01
yeah, that’s part of it. and, you know, on there, in today’s world, you may not create a big binder. and, you know, it might be a little looser, like one of the things that we, you know, have recommended that firms do, especially as you move to more remote and blended learning is to is to do your teaching, you know, using diagrams and using shared screens over zoom and recording at home, you know, and if i do that, and i’m not trying to picture like typing processes in a word document, then do this, then do that. but instead i’m i’m you know, i have a diagram of the process, and what roles there are and what the steps are to the delivery of the service. and i walk through that on a zoom call with people and answer their questions and we record the whole thing. that’s a wonderful training document, as we’re bringing people into the process, and, you know, so trying to rethink how we’re documenting those process. as to so they’re more digital and more accessible, because right now we’re in this state of overwhelm. so when you say things like, let’s document the processes, people are like, i can’t get the workout, i’m not going to stop right? to procedures. so anyway, there there are ways of getting it done. perhaps not super easy, but more easily.
liz farr 25:23
yeah, you can always just shoot a little loom video and walk through how it gets done. that’s so simple to do. now, what about growth? what are some good strategies for growth that you have seen? or, you know, let me back up and just say, do firms really even need to grow?
jennifer wilson 25:46
yeah, so thank you, because you, were you, thank you for the edit of the question, because i was gonna go there first. so right now selling new services to existing clients and selling new clients. today, you know, june, whatever, eighth or ninth, ninth, 2022. right, this minute, selling services is like shooting fish in a barrel. so most firms are expecting, you know, double digit, top line growth and fees. part of that is going to be fee increases, which we have been telling you increase fees, at least 10%. this year, we’ve, we’ve been saying that, that 2022 and 223. year, you should have the 10% times three rule right now and your firm fees up for all clients 10%. employee comp, expect 10%? you know, we think that that’s just gonna be the average across all increases on the comp side, and then fire 10% of your clients. oh, yeah. so when you talk to me about growth, the first place i’m going is we have to make room to grow. remember, we don’t have capacity. so i talked to you about non traditional capacity. but then the other side of that is eliminate the clients that are slow pay, no pay their mean, their environment is unpleasant, their train wreck, mass in terms of their data, or we’re worried about their integrity, perhaps even, you know, all of those are just low hanging fruit to fire and we can all you and i cannot and the people listening to this podcast can be like, yep, that’s who we should fire. but when we get down to it, firms are firing those people. so that was the place to make room, right. and then who who are the clients that are buying services from us single service clients, maybe they don’t value the services, if we try to raise it raise fees, the at least 10% that we have to, you know, that we they are going to require a phone call to discuss it and, you know, sort of get into nickel and diming. man, all of those are suspicious for firing. so if i was going to try to help a firm grow, we’re going to start there.
liz farr 28:03
yeah, yeah. oh, i agree. and it also improves morale among your team, when you get rid of those awful clients.
jennifer wilson 28:15
yeah, nothing builds trust and respect more, liz nothing. then demonstrating to your people. that a you’re going to live by sort of the values and the vision of the organization. but be, you’re going to sometimes do unpleasant things that are required to protect the ecosystem and are really necessary for the greater good. your team members need to know you’ll make those tough decisions that includes letting clients go. it also includes letting staff or team members that aren’t performing go. and it includes saying goodbye to firm leaders who are off brand, who are who are not really inspiring and motivating our people. they’re not taking care of our people. but instead they’re repelling our people for a variety of reasons. and those leaders when a leader takes that step and says, hey, this partner might be the biggest rainmaker we have. but she’s kind of a bully to our people. she’s mean and demeaning and diminishing to our staff. and we’ve coached her and we’ve supported her and we’ve tried to get her help, and it’s not changing and she can’t work here anymore. she can go do that for another firm. and that happens, liz, when a firm takes that kind of a stand against, you know, against the things that we are committed not to have in our place. the team is so grateful, so impressed, so amazed. it brings help. and i tell firms all the time, go go fire that 10% of the time. like it’s like tomorrow, and make sure your team knows you’re doing it and that you did it. and and you know that you give them a list of who’s not here anymore as a result of that initiative so they can see it. and you will bring hope to the team, they will think, oh, my gosh, these guys and gals are going to do something to make this place better. they’re not going to just sit back and say, well, we’re victim to it, we’re, you know, this is our old business model. and we have to keep doing what we’ve always done. they’re willing to make the ugly changes necessary. so maybe they’ll make some of the cool changes necessary to
liz farr 30:37
oh, your, if more people would listen to you, there would be so much more hope in the profession.
jennifer wilson 30:46
well, we have such a cool profession. this i mean, we do and it’s people, we help people. you know, i had a young man, tell me this week at the aicpa engage conference, that he said, i just want you to know that, you know, through your coaching, and through your support and assistance, i have gotten myself in a position where i know for sure, now that i’m going to be able to put my kids through college. and i just want to thank you for it. now, that was me as a leadership coach being thanked by cpas have clients and businesses that can say that to them, just an unbelievable number, the difference we’re making. you know, i like to say that the accounting profession is the guardian of the world’s economy. and, you know, keeping financial well being alive here. and it’s such a cool profession, and it’s people based, so it’s fun it can be fun with and have these great relationships with and so why are we bringing all this like, i don’t know, drudgery, or some sort of fingerless glove will pen ebenezer scrooge, something, you know, i don’t know what it is. but why? why do we allow that stuff to creep into this cool, cool profession. and it’s been here and we act like it’s, it’s been perpetrated upon us, and we don’t have a choice. and we do. so i just can’t wait to see what’s happening. because here’s the deal. all of these changes are coming, whether firm leaders are going to be proactive about them or not. so if they’re not proactive, there are people their best and brightest will be gone. and they will be unable to sustain this business, and they hope to sell it. but there may be no buyers for that business, especially if you don’t have people without talent. most people don’t want that business anymore. because everybody’s scraping for talent, why would i buy more business to serve when i don’t have the people to serve it. so this isn’t optional, this this, this change is coming. so firms that are really on the forefront making it happen, or people are excited about it, because they know it’s coming to and they’re just thrilled to be leading and learning while they’re making these changes and seeing the possibilities of being part of a firm that they want to own someday and and that’s what all firm leaders should be doing is trying to figure out, hey, why don’t we need to change. so you want to own this thing. and if they stopped and listened, and then empower those people to make those changes, because that’s the other thing is, most people, they think i don’t want to do this because i don’t want to do the work to do the change. i don’t even know how to change it. give it to your next generation say i am going to empower you to make the changes you want. and they’ll figure it out. let them figure it out. they’ll do it. and those that are doing that have an incredible competitive advantage right now.
liz farr 33:39
absolutely, absolutely. now, it used to be that to be successful, as an accountant, you needed to keep the irs regulations in your head. and you need to be really good with a 10 key. but technology’s taken care of a lot of that. so what are the skills that accountants need to be successful today and in the future?
jennifer wilson 34:10
i think, you know, more and more accountants need to understand business. you know, when you first take your first accounting class, they say accounting is the language of business, right? so, but i don’t know that we, you know, really started teaching strategy to people. and so, like, understanding business, understanding industries and understanding trends, and paying attention to them and and looking at our dependencies inside business processes and keeping up with what’s happening in technology for the clients that you serve. those skills are necessary, of course, always always relational skills. now it used to be that the higher the the technical iq oh, you know, the more i had a computer for a brain that i could memorize all that stuff, then, you know, the more valuable i was, well, today, it’s, it’s being able to relate to clients, and have them share their hopes and dreams and fears and concerns, and being able to give them advice and coach them and help them apply the ideas that are going to make them successful and to adhere to standards, you know, to be able to relate how to adhere to standards and why they have to and all of that’s relationship communication. i have to tell you, there’s curiosity, and you can’t teach curiosity, you can teach how to query or how to question which curiosity. but i think that that’s another attribute that’s really required. the other thing that i just want to say, because to me, it’s the number one attribute that that firms should look for in people and that they should also be trying to cultivate as a firm attribute. and that’s generosity. yes, and, and the willingness to put aside selfish interest for the greater good of the organization, or the client engagement, or the team that i’m serving on or whatever it may be. and so having people learn what selfish behaviors look like, and what generous behaviors look like, and how to be transparent about when my selfish interest is under attack, or when i feel like protecting it, how to approach that in a way that doesn’t get me, you know, booed out of a room that people could respect my honesty and vulnerability and how we negotiate through those things together, all of those things are important skills.
liz farr 36:50
oh, i haven’t heard anybody else talk about generosity. but that is just incredibly important. you know, and, and, and when you think of when an accountant thinks about generosity, their first impulse might be well, giving away free advice. but i don’t i think that just barely scratches the surface of it.
jennifer wilson 37:18
yeah. no, i mean, it’s not that at all, in my mind that i guess that could be an attribute or a piece of it. but to me, you know, if you said, jen, like, you have to pick one thing that can contribute most to the success of an organization or its dysfunction, i would say, success, generosity, dysfunction, selfishness. so you know, an organization that allows certain selfish beings in the business, whether their clients or partners, or staff members, or whoever they may be, they allow those selfish interests to rise above the best interest of the team. and they don’t address it, they don’t discuss it, which is super common. and we’re so harmed, harmonious and conflict, avoidant, and accommodating that we don’t discuss this stuff. but selfish behaviors that screw up, the firm and the team that don’t go addressed are so demoralizing and damaging. and i’ll give i mean, there’s 1000 possible examples. but one simple one is, you know, let’s pretend that i was two years away from retiring and i was supposed to be actively transitioning clients introducing you to all my clients, or my successor, i’m supposed to introduce you, you’re supposed to be in there. now, in the service delivery cycle, i should be assisting you not leading, but i’m not doing any of those things. and people can’t figure out why well, but then if we dig a little deeper, we discover that my compensation is still tied to my bill run. and so for me to grasp rolling to you, i can’t because that would mean that my compensation is going to be reduced. also, maybe my buyout might be calculated based upon either my bill run or or based upon my book of business. and so transition those to you might affect my, you know, my my buyout or my deferred comp, and so i’m selfishly holding on, you know, i hold on to those clients and people think, well, she just doesn’t want to like oh, maybe i would love to let go but i’m busy operating in like hoarding the money mentality, instead of saying, hey, we should be changing the way comp is done for retirees and we should be changing the way deferred comp we should freeze that two years out, and hey, folks, if we don’t my selfish interest is that i wouldn’t want them do this transition. and i want to be perfectly transparent. you know, that kind of thing. we just don’t do that. we don’t talk like that. we just behave strangely out of kind of a covert selfish interest and that’s where dysfunction lives right there.
liz farr 39:58
yeah, i have seeing that all too often with partners who are ready to leave, and they’re not transitioning their client base to somebody else, they’re not getting one of the junior level people in and saying, okay, i want you to ride along, be my co pilot for the next cycle of what i do for this client. and then the next cycle, i want you to leave. i just don’t you just don’t see that?
jennifer wilson 40:33
well, some do. but um, you know, i mean, i meet a lot of generous people. most firm incentive programs today don’t incentivize mentoring or developing people, you know, they’re, they incentivize billing more, you know, hours to clients. and they incentivize business development, but not people development, right. but i meet a lot of really wonderful people, developers, they’re generous, they, they understand how critical that is to sustainability and to their own leverage, and, you know, work life integration, and all those things. so they do it anyway, even though there’s not necessarily the same promotion or financial incentives. so there, there are generous acts happening all the time i see them, we just have to recognize that as human beings, we do have selfish interest. and some of us are more selfish than others. and those people, if we always talked about selfish behavior, if we pointed it out, if we said, this is what selfishness looks like, or i’m afraid you’re acting out of selfish interest here, let’s take a look at that, if we were willing to discuss it, it would be less acceptable. and, and if it would be made transparent, which is awkward. it’s hard for me to keep being selfish, if you’ve, you know, outed me for my selfishness. and, and so firms just don’t talk like that, you know, so we allow strange manipulation to happen. and we all know it, they do talk about it. i know, they talk about it, because when i go into do an assessment, and i interview people, they tell me all the selfish stuff that’s happening, but they don’t discuss it as a team in order to address it or have it in a generosity of value, that sort of thing. so anyway, i appreciate that you let me talk about it here, because i think it’s the most important attribute or value a firm could have.
liz farr 42:29
i am with you 100%. generosity is so important. now, i want you to put on your credit, get your crystal ball out, and try to imagine what will be the next big thing in accounting? right now, client accounting services, client advisory services is big. what do you think will be next?
jennifer wilson 43:01
well, i guess i’m going to say that i feel like there’s more next in every segment that we already have to start. so like client accounting is big, only in that it’s finally, like acceptable to have a client accounting practice. i mean, it’s it used to be sort of thought of as, i don’t know, a lesser service or something, maybe because of a lack of compliance or the fact that it could be done by non cpas or something. but now, it’s just so value add and clients needed so badly and appreciate it so much. but there’s so much more there was we’re just scratching the surface. so i think all the advisory around client accounting is mammoth. i would love to see firms do a lot more of the consulting related to what they’re seeing in the financials they’re producing, and really coached clients. and i think we’re, we haven’t become a coaching profession yet. we’ve given advice, but we, we tend to have our green eyeshade down, eyes on eyes on the next deliverable and not up and looking out to the horizon for the client. so i just think without a doubt, there is so much more potential for that. and as client accounting continues to rise, i think you’re going to see the rise of far more advice and coaching to clients on the same on the tax side. there is a ton of tax consulting to be done and not you know, a lot of folks have thought of tax consulting as like a big firm thing or something and it’s not. and some firms call it tax planning. you know, it’s way more than that. but i see that that is this wonderful greenfield i think we’re going to see more next gen firms choose to specialize way more than we’re seeing now. so this idea of we’re a full service firm, i think we’ll see a lot of attrition to that model. i also think that, you know, we serve everybody, no, i think we’re going to specialize far more on ideal target clients and industry niches and type of service niches, i think that, you know, we will see more cool advisory that steps away from the accounting boundaries, you could say, esg is still inside the accounting sweet spot, you know, we’ve done compliance audits and those kinds of things forever, but it is stepping to the periphery of what we’ve traditionally done, the actual numbers, and i, i see that as if we could find a way to really take hold of that as a profession, that’s a cool, you know, significant potential to rise into something because it’s so needed. and for a variety of reasons, our world needs it, our globe needs it. and then, you know, i see us as if we get into that coach mode, we might find ourselves doing a lot more of that strategic work for clients. and, and strategic planning, hr consulting, marketing services, we’re seeing bigger firms do those kinds of, you know, hire those kinds of disciplines, and really go after it with their corporate clients. and i think we’re going to continue to see more of that as especially as kind of add ons to client accounting. you know, so maybe i’m, i’m a real client accounting person, but i lead a enago, maybe i keep tax, maybe not, maybe i, i just really go into that business, financial and holistic consulting and coaching to clients, and partner with or, you know, other firms for the rest, i don’t know, i think we’re gonna see more of those kinds of decisions getting made.
liz farr 46:58
thank you, probably onto something there. now, if somebody, you know, in, in our accounting classes, and most of our cpe, we learn all the regulations, we learn all the how to, but we don’t really learn much about coaching, and how businesses work. and you talked earlier about how accountants really do need to learn more about how business works. so how can we bring more of that coaching mentality into the profession?
jennifer wilson 47:39
well, i think the education process is better for the current crop of cpas, and, and consultants and accountants and advisors that are coming in, because i do think that they are getting better, more strategic business classes at college, but you know, i think the first place to learn strategy and learn how to operate a business is in your own firm, and being willing to, you know, dig in and learn about mission and vision and values and, and assess your own. and then really understanding operational functions. you know, i hear a lot of cpa firm partners say, i don’t really know what they do over there in the hr department, you know, like, and i think, are you kidding? about find out, you know, and that and they’ll say, you know, they, they, they say they’re woefully under resource, but i don’t really know what they do besides, you know, recruiting and, you know, and i’m like, oh, boy, there’s 10 major hr functions, employee relations and benefits administration and compensation and performance management, and blah, blah, blah, you know, maybe you should understand that. so if i’m really going to coach clients, on the business side, i’ve got to learn more about the business functions and firms can can educate. i mean, we, you know, there’s nothing stopping a firm from creating that education as part of their learning curriculum. we are developing soft skills on the leadership and management side, but we can teach more about business and more about specialty industries and trends and all of those things. and then the more experience you have, of course, the more you can say, well, here’s what i’ve seen at this client that really worked. part of my job as a coach isn’t necessarily to have all the answers, but to have all the connections of all the people that i know are trying things and connecting my clients to them, you know, and saying, hey, if you’re really thinking about moving away from that time sheet, i have a couple of clients who’ve done it, and i have one that’s in the middle of the transition, and i’d love to talk to them. and so, you know, part of being a really awesome advisor and coach is really connecting. and so building that network and learning how to build a network is going to be critical as well. so most of these things can be taught and should be part of your competency model and curriculum for your people.
liz farr 50:00
i think that that’s a perfect way to end our conversation to expand the competencies. thank you so much, jen for taking the time to talk to me. now, if people want to connect with you, where’s the best place to find you?
jennifer wilson 50:19
well, welch, our website, probably convergence coaching.com. we have a context sensitive blog, we’ve been blogging, and we post every wednesday since 2007. so we have tons and tons and tons of frameworks and business models and ideas that you could context sensitive search and share guidance and ideas back at your firm on these on these ideas discussed today. so that’s probably the place to start. i would welcome anybody who wants to to connect with me in social on linkedin or my twitter handle jen lee wilson gnle, wi l. s. o n. love to hear your ideas on the ideas that we’ve shared today and follow you back. so i think those are probably the best ways.