the tough love only you can apply to your practice.
by frank stitely
the relentless cpa
i know … you became a cpa because that sounded like an adult job that would give you the financial resources to buy that lamborghini and winter in the south of france. have that lamborghini yet? me neither. clearly, people lied to us – #fakecareers. i’m not really into $2,000 oil changes anyway.
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so, let’s shift the focus from you to your firm. what will your firm be when it grows up? what do you want it to be? how do you transform your firm to make it the best it can be?
we are going to transform your firm with a very simple, but difficult, thought experiment. einstein discovered relativity with thought experiments. the least we can do is make a little money in his honor.
start by imagining you’re starting a brand-new business with zero revenue and no operations. go out and drop $20 on a set of cheesy business cards that list you as president, ceo, chairman, coo, cfo, cio, founder and managing partner. if you’ve been in business for a while, you’ve met with hundreds of these losers. the next one who reaches $1 million in revenue will be the first.
you will be the chairperson of a hot new startup looking to raise money from angel investors. we are going to reimagine your cpa firm as a startup from the ground up. what will it take to attract investors?
how is this exercise relevant to you? someday, maybe soon, you’ll sell your firm, and the attributes that make your firm attractive to a buyer will be the same attributes that would attract an investor in your startup firm. why are we imagining your firm as a startup? because you have a lot of assumptions about how your firm should operate that just aren’t true.
you didn’t necessarily do a rotten job running your business, but maybe you did. your firm likely drifted more than it evolved. let’s strip the assumptions away and start fresh. if you were 25, how would you create a firm? ok, maybe 35, if you can’t even remember 25. i can’t.
what does every self-respecting owner of a startup do? let’s hire a consultant! where should we start our search? obviously, we should look for someone who has absolutely no experience running a cpa firm. if we can’t find that person, let’s hire someone who hasn’t done a workpaper since the 1980s. if we’re still striking out, let’s hire someone who ran a firm for a few years and discovered that talking about running a cpa firm is easier than running one.