four strategies for a future-ready firm

embrace these to ensure you remain relevant.

by donny c. shimamoto
the center for accounting transformation

a recent article from harvard business review, “what makes a company future-ready?”, shared insights from multiple industries in looking at which companies adapted and thrived versus those that didn’t perform as well.

related: the changes ahead for corporate finance | top issues for 2022: talent, time, and transformation

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as i read through the article, i couldn’t help but think, “how would these insights apply to accounting firms and the future of accounting?”

article insight 1: don’t play the zero-sum game with disruptors

looking at the fintech industry, the article pointed out that despite apple pay and google pay coming in to disrupt the physical card market, mastercard and visa invested in a wide range of apis that made their product more accessible to third-party developers (including apple and google), broadening their usage without them having to do the work themselves. compare this to american express, which kept its payment infrastructure closed and tried to do everything in-house.

the article concludes this section with this advice: “at all times, you must maintain a healthy portion of activities dedicated to exploring the new, even when early evidence remains unclear, and commit yourself to difficult choices and tough tradeoffs guided by a vision about the future when evidence becomes compelling.”

embrace disruptors that elevate your services

so how does this apply to our accounting industry? well, we’ve got technology-driven bookkeeping services, like bench and quickbooks live, that are commoditizing bookkeeping and creating fully digital experiences for clients. learning from american express, we know that accounting firms can’t develop their own bookkeeping automation technologies and compete with these types of companies that have a ton of venture capital or wall street investments behind them.

instead, firms should be looking at technologies that also automate commoditized areas, like tax compliance and bookkeeping, and integrate them into their services offices. two vendors that immediately come to mind with this are sureprep (tax automation and outsourced return preparation) and botkeeper (bookkeeping automation and outsourcing). firms should be embracing these hybrid vendors that combine technology and services to offload lower-end (and non-client-facing) work, so that your firm’s team can focus on the analysis of the resulting data and more advisory services.

also, consider one key element that mass commoditized services can’t do well – client experience. successful accountants know that the best clients are those with whom you have a relationship, where the work is not just all transactional. we often unconsciously delivered this experience in the way that we treated a client when they visited our offices, or in how we interacted with them on the golf course or over lunch. the question to ask yourself is have you figured out how to translate that experience into the digital world? if you embrace the automations that reduce the amount of grunt work that your teams have to do, consider shifting some of that free time to designing a digital or hybrid experience that will surprise and delight your clients and prospects.

article insight 2: utilize high learning and high certainty decision-making

according to the article, nike uses data analytics and a hybrid physical store and app-integrated experience to enable better cross-channel predictions and other sales optimization decisions. however, they’re just not passively listening to the data. nike, lululemon and hermes all use an experimentation mindset to guide their learning. they start with strong, informed hypotheses (“high certainty”) and then pivot quickly based on learning.

embrace the experimental mindset

as accountants, we worry a lot about getting things “right.” we always hold ourselves to a high standard of accuracy and quality. this mindset, though, can hinder our ability to innovate and be agile. instead, we need to develop reasonable hypotheses and then test these hypotheses and fail fast so we can learn, update our hypotheses, and then try the experiment again. i know the very idea of failure scares many of us, but we can’t let perfectionism cause us to stagnate.

the disruption caused by this learning method can be disastrous during busy season, so identify the problems and develop your hypotheses during your post-busy season debriefs. then use the engagements over the summer to experiment and test new tools and techniques. learn from those experiences and refine your hypotheses, try different tools and techniques, and figure out what is the best fit for your firm. then during the fall, incorporate the changes into your standard operating procedures and train all your teams on them. then you’ll be ready to be highly successful during the next busy season.

consider joining some peer groups like the boomer circles or ones facilitated by the cpa firm association(s) of which you’re a member and attend vendor conferences where you can talk with similarly sized firms – you may be able to leverage lessons learned from other firms that have already run some experiments. however, keep in mind that their assumptions and parameters may be different than yours. be sure to understand what those were and how they may have affected the outcomes of their experiences before adopting their learning or assuming their lessons will work for you.

article insight 3: agility and speed trump size

“knowing how to make decisions quickly is essential to surviving in a fast-paced industry. but, to do so, you need to identify which decisions are reversible,” advised the article. it cited amazon’s jeff bezos, who called these decisions two-way doors – decisions that you could back out of later if you didn’t like the direction. the article also cited microsoft’s “healthy bias for action” while remaining “unfailingly realistic,” compared to ibm, which was more monolithic and conservative.

embrace decision frameworks that enable action

this may sound a lot like the experimental mindset described earlier, but i think there are two other things to consider here: (1) be wary of analysis paralysis and (2) commit to action. one trap i see firms get stuck in is “forever trials.” this is where a firm does a trial of a software (i.e., it runs an experiment), but it never takes the steps to address issues found or drive broader mainstream adoption. this doesn’t only happen with technology; i’ve also seen this with business practices like value pricing.

as i outlined in the last section, the experiments you run must lead to changes for the next busy season. because of the cyclical nature of our work, if you don’t enact change by fall, you practically have to wait another year to enact the change again. the article mentioned that microsoft’s executives focused on preventing catastrophe while exploring new businesses and technologies. but they didn’t focus on what could go wrong. instead, they focused on reasonable risk management, learning and pivoting. accounting firms need to take this same approach: recognize that there will be problems when you roll things out at scale. experiment and do trials to try and stop the catastrophes, then roll out the initiatives with the right resources and support in place to deal with issue that arise. action trumps inaction.

article insight 4: silo thinking limits innovation

the article says that the automotive industry is “unaccustomed to exploration and experimentation, a conservative sector filled with managers with similar backgrounds.” as i read that i thought, “whoa, that’s our accounting industry too!” the article’s advice to overcome this: “worry less about keeping up and more about finding a new viewpoint.” it explained how tesla embraced disciplines outside of mechanical engineering, and incorporated software into everything it did to solve problems.

embrace diversity of perspective to drive holistic solutions

many people and associations are talking about the threat to our profession as more non-accountants are hired by accounting firms. i believe this to be a good thing because as we deal with more complex problems, we need cross-disciplinary perspectives to develop better holistic solutions. too often i see accountants get stuck in silo thinking or i see partner-level people worry more about looking like they don’t know everything rather than considering the advice or perspectives of other professionals like it, hr and marketing.

the solution to things like “the great resignation” is not going to come from any of us alone. managing a remote accounting workforce and extending firm culture into the digital work environment requires it, hr, communications, marketing and an understanding of the actual work being done itself – accounting. i started my career with a double major in accounting and management information systems, and then i went back to do additional graduate work in organizational development (a mix of hr and psychology), because i knew that driving true accounting innovation would take more than just technology.

with the increased visibility of environmental social and governance (esg) reporting, our profession will need to embrace the experience of other professionals to be able to adequately assess risk, determine the right standards for reporting, and ensure that the interest of the public is upheld by those providing these reports. so, we need to embrace other disciplines – not just internally, but also as part of our service delivery.

embrace these practices to be future-ready

the article ended stating, “the fear of losing in the near term is very real. but the threat of losing relevance looms even larger.” we constantly hear about this threat of loss of relevance for accountants – the aicpa says it, our state cpa societies say it, and i hear it said in the thought leader discussions in which i participate.

if you want to ensure your firm remains relevant:

• develop hypotheses informed by a diversity of perspectives;
• experiment to validate those hypotheses;
• learn from the experiments and adjust as needed; and
• drive action and well-managed change.

by following the above, you can trust that your firm won’t be disrupted and that it will be ready for any challenges that arise in the future.

 

posted on april 28, 2022