there are three ways to change the product-market fit. only one works.
by jody padar
the radical cpa
it’s hard to look at your firm from a customer’s perspective. that’s why we gravitate to a firmcentric point of view. this point of view asks questions like: what do we sell customers? how can we reach customers? what do we need to establish with our customers? and how can we make money from our customers?
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we’re thinking about ourselves internally. nobody wants to hang out with someone who only thinks of themselves, yet that is the way we run our firms.
instead, i’m going to ask you to look at your business from your customer’s point of view. design thinking asks the following:
- what jobs do our customers need to get done and how can we help?
- what are our customers’ dreams and aspirations?
- how can we help them live them out?
- how do our customers want to be addressed?
- how do we as an enterprise best fit into their routines?
- what relationship do our customers expect us to establish with them?
- what values are our customers truly willing to pay for?
the more customercentric you make your business, the more you’re going to deliver value and set yourself apart from other cpa firms. you’ll also make more money.
from a customer’s perspective what experience is going to delight them? you have a new generation of staff – how are you going to relate to them? you have your legacy customers and your more traditional employees – how are you going to make it work for all of them together? do you create two different processes, one for “old school” and “new school” customers?
you can’t possibly know exactly what your “new firm” model is going to look like, but once you start moving, as you move, you’ll figure out what that vision looks like and how it comes together. this is not an impossible feat! i will provide the framework and tools you’ll need to make it happen.
get ready to be disrupted!
with revolutionary change comes disruption. you knew that, right? the three laws of disruption say that:
- disruption comes to us all. so, if you’re reading this post, you’re going to be disrupted. congratulations, that’s a good thing!
- disruption comes because of changes in the product-market fit.
- there are only three methods to change the product-market fit.
drum roll, please (the three methods)
- we can change the product so that it’s a better fit with the target market.
- we could change the target market so that it’s a better fit with the product.
- we could change people’s preferences so that they value the product more.
the only answer for us accountants is … we have to change our product so that it fits with the new target market.
we don’t have an opportunity to change the target market. we cannot make next-generation business owners move backward. it’s already moving, so number two is not really an option for us. finally, we can’t change people’s preferences so that they like our product more. come on.
transitioning into a “new firm” will kick up dust in your current processes and disruption will be in the air. how will your “new firm” business model gain management support in an anytime-anywhere environment? what will it look like if some of your team is remote? how are you going to support your staff and your administration? or what if you decide to become a virtual office? there are a lot of people who run virtual firms, but even if you decide to run one you have to figure out what that specifically means for your team.
once you start value pricing, how will you compensate your employees? they pick up the notion of value very quickly. after you start selling on value, it is hard to pay on time-based work. this disrupts it all, right? how will your staff account for time if they’re doing work at 9:30 p.m. and you can’t see them? this is disruptive and that’s why you have to rethink everything you have ever known to be true. this is the hard part. after all, it disrupts the 9 to 5 workday!
some questions you will now face:
- will you have office hours, or are you comfortable with flexible schedules as long as the work gets done?
- can employees work remotely from an alternative device?
- how will you compensate employees for this “always on” position?
- will you still pay an hourly rate, or for a percentage of a completed product?
aside from creating a new way to do compensation and work, the “new firm” model brings upon a whole new level of transparency for both the customers you work with and your employees. here are just some of the things that shift:
- data is changed in real time. no longer can you say that you never got that fax or email.
- more clarity in communication and expectations is required.
- what you communicate and how you deliver these communications will materially change, which calls for better monitoring of how team members communicate as well.
- communication tools will vary. are you using email, phone, video-conference, in-person, text or facebook?
- how will you feel about your employees having transparent communications with firm customers and, more important, how is all this communication shared internally?
what are you selling now? (something different!)
you have now moved beyond number cruncher to be an advisor. as a result, your questions have moved to a whole new level:
- are you selling a tax return or a financial statement, or are you really selling the knowledge related to those deliverables?
- are those deliverables even necessary, or is another metric or financial interpretation of real-time data more important to your customer?
- is your team trained on delivering the communications related to the deliverable? can your team member talk a customer through the deliverable without confusing and frustrating the customer?
- do you have a way to teach and measure this new skill?
the biggest problem many firms face, and this happens in my own firm as well, is that a team member will say something to a customer, another team member who doesn’t know what transpired talks to the same customer, and then you talk to the customer and you realize something happened. communication isn’t just happening over email. communications are taking place on social media and the question now becomes how are staff members following that up and transferring it to email or a knowledge base to let someone else know about it?
again it’s all about the real-time communication that’s happening.
how are you capturing it? it’s going to change the way you communicate. if twitter is most active after 9 p.m. and before 9 a.m. obviously that’s not office hours. facebook is active after dinner. social media is up and running 24/7. how are you going to work in this world? we are going to have to figure it out. it really makes you think about how you’re going to have to shift your perspective and quantify your priorities.