and 5 ways to fix it.
by frank stitely
beeeeeep. briiinnnnggg. boooooop. you reach over to turn off the alarm.
but it’s not your alarm, and it’s not 6 a.m. yet. it’s the coffee maker. or is it the dishwasher? or the washing machine? it turns out to be a text message. you glance down at your smartphone, and you see 14 app notifications, 27 e-mails, and three texts. your smartwatch yells at you for not meeting your “fitness” goal yesterday.
by 6 a.m., half of humanity competes for your attention. every computer programmer on the planet believes his notifications rock your world. when everything beeps, do any of the beeps really matter? the rock group, chicago, wrote, “does anybody really know what time it is?” yes, it’s time for another notification.
we don’t suffer alone. our clients share our pain.
the value pricing people tell us that we aren’t selling time. but we are. we aren’t selling our time. we are selling our clients’ time – back to them. 21st-century clients want perfect compliance, fast service, and a competitive price – as a start. most importantly, they want us to save them time.
do you change the oil in your car? of course not. are you smart enough to figure out how? certainly. when i google’d “how do i change my oil?” i got thousands of links. i’m still not motivated. i’d rather watch sports or sleep or watchdog videos on facebook.
your best clients are smart enough to use turbotax. they’re millionaires after all. they’ve got smart down pat. they could manage their own investments and do their own accounting. but they don’t. why? for the same reason, you don’t change your oil – time. they have higher value things to do. you don’t get to be a millionaire by making bad time management decisions.
what does this mean for us? clients want fewer meetings and telephone calls. that doesn’t mean they want less communication. our best clients want more – just not meetings and phone calls. does that mean more e-mails? no. our clients’ inboxes overflow with all of the same irs scam e-mails we get.
they want secure communications where they feel safe discussing their financial situations. they want to communicate when they want. when do your programmer clients respond to your tax return questions? 3 a.m. – after eight energy drinks and a delicious pizza delivered by former accountants, who believed portals were a passing fad.
so you’ve got the e-communications thing down pat. your client asks whether she should lease or buy that lamborghini for the business. you respond with a 4,000-word treatise starting out with the legislative history of code section 162. wrong. 21st-century clients have the attention span of gnats, thanks in large part to facebook and twitter.
you have two paragraphs to engage your client. anything beyond that might as well be typed in an invisible font. you could put the winning number to the lottery in paragraph five and rest assured your clients won’t win.
one of our client e-blasts started out, “if you get a notice from the irs…”. we then proceeded to explain that they should send us the notices. here are some of the responses we got.
“why didn’t you tell me i got a notice from the irs?”
“please send me a copy of the notice.”
“did you mess up my tax return? you owe me for any penalties.”
“if” is a problematic word for clients. “if” requires work on their part deciphering a logic tree. that requires time and brain processing cycles better spent watching mr. angry cat videos on facebook.
that doesn’t mean clients don’t want you to tell them about the new tax law. it just means that you must take as little of their time as possible. think along these lines.
“new tax law good.” or “new tax law bad.”
we need the aicpa to create a set of emojis for tax returns, or maybe an all emoji audit opinion.
clients pay us to distill our knowledge into packets of recommendations they can implement quickly. in many cases, they’ll pay us for the implementation. they’ll pay our wealth management gurus to buy index funds that they could buy for next to nothing with a phone call. they’ll pay us to reconcile their checking accounts. if they pay people to walk their dogs to avoid exercise, they’ll pay us to calculate how many exemptions they should be claiming for their paychecks.
the challenge for 21st century cpa’s is finding how many ways we can save clients time. 21st-century client communications demand five considerations:
first, stop thinking meetings and telephone calls are preferred methods to communicate. meetings require both you and the client to be in the same place at the same time. that’s doubly inconvenient for both of you. telephone calls require that both parties be available at the same time. that’s merely inconvenient.
there are places and times for both meetings and telephone calls, but they shouldn’t be your default methods of communication. most annual tax return meetings aren’t worth the cost to you nor do they greatly benefit your client. here’s how you know that. if you feel your erudite recommendations are that valuable, move meetings to discuss them out of tax season, and charge for them. if you can’t bill for them, they aren’t as valuable as you believe.
second, communicate securely. one e-mail disadvantage is that it’s not secure. yes, this is an overblown concern, but clients don’t think it is. however, the biggest disadvantage to e-mail is the overwhelming volume. this isn’t just your problem. your best clients may face this even more than you. how many times has outlook frustrated your quest to find that message from last week? use practice management software that lets you communicate with clients in the software behind a firewall. finding that message from last week or two years ago is a cinch.
third, clients communicate when they choose to communicate – mostly while you’re on vacation. use practice management solutions that let them communicate on their schedules, and let you respond on your schedule.
fourth, keep messages short and understandable. using “if” is an iffy practice. keep all communications short. then make them shorter. if you blog on the new tax law, break the new law into client digestible pieces. i covered the new section 199a over three posts.
for blog posts, anything beyond about a page is wasted. don’t agree? how many times have you scrolled past a facebook post, because reading it looked like work? you get two short paragraphs to make recommendations in e-mail messages.
eliminate technical terms and acronyms. they only serve to make you look smart, not communicate essential information. if your writing style tends towards, “the greater of the lesser of…”, nobody reads what you’re writing.
my favorite articles include phrases like, “certain taxpayers are eligible…”. which taxpayers are eligible? tell me. you’re writing the damn article. if you write this way, ball up your right fist, and punch yourself. don’t even get me started on “adjusted basis.”
do you abbreviate “alternative minimum tax” as amt? not even your spouse knows what “amt” means unless you are married to a cpa. in that case, you have plenty of other issues to address.
finally, make recommendations. in our office, we ask, “where’s the weenie?” if you have no recommendations, you’re not ready to communicate. twenty years ago, i had the following conversation with a client.
me: i offered a brilliant analysis detailing the pros and cons of a possible business transaction. i told my client that the choice boiled down to whether she valued savings today or more savings down the road.
her: “what is best?”
me: i repeated my stunningly brilliant business analysis, and again ended with a choice for her to make.
her: “but what is best?”
i wasted 587 breaths explaining the choice and not offering a recommendation. today, i would send a message as follows:
me: “choice a j. choice b l.”
not offering recommendations wastes everyone’s time.
you’ll make more money, and be happier when you understand that the 21st-century cpa sells time back to clients. not all heroes wear capes.