look outside the cpa world for practice management answers.
by frank stitely
the relentless cpa
there are no easy answers. the people who are selling “firm of the future” once sold “elder care” as the future. did you make a killing off elder care? that was one rotting corpse of an idea.
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do you want advice from someone who found consulting to cpas more profitable than being a cpa?
do you want advice from someone whose income is probably less than yours? remember the success expert from the movie, “little miss sunshine”? just follow the seven steps, except that they didn’t work for him.
i looked into a franchise business coaching program a couple of years ago. i determined that a really successful business coach with that franchise could expect to earn about $70,000 a year. not an average coach, a very successful one. who should be coaching whom? at least i know a dog business when i see one.
there is no single change to your practice that will get you that lamborghini. improving requires lots of changes.
where should you turn for advice? look in the damn mirror. hello, meet you, the only consultant with your best interests at heart. you must drive the improvement process.
i am asking you to reimagine your firm from the ground up. if you want transformational change, this is the only way. as cpas, we minister to everyone’s businesses but our own. if you were advising a client on transformational change, where would you start?
first, you would break the company down into its parts:
- marketing
- operations
if you pitched the idea of starting a cpa firm to investors, you’d put together a slide deck covering these areas. note that i didn’t write “business plan.” that term is dead in the 21st century. if someone, like a banker, tells you that a client needs a business plan, give the banker a geritol and take him to dinner at 4 p.m. for the early bird special. you have a geezer on your hands. stay close to a crash cart. he’ll code before dessert.
what systems do you need to obtain clients (marketing) and then to serve clients (operations)? i’ll leave marketing to marketing experts. instead, i’ll talk about a portion of operations, specifically project management, but we’ll view project management in the broadest sense, encompassing hidden aspects such as people management. you can’t manage projects without managing people. i’ve tried.
when you evaluate ideas to implement, look outside the cpa world. our clients are told to consult us on everything, but our industry is woefully behind other industries in management sophistication and management resources. finding books on cpa firm management, written by real practitioners, is difficult. most of the books were written by consultants selling easy answers.