getting creative can bring in better talent and better clients.
by frank stitely
the relentless cpa
one afternoon, the partner group of our outsourced accounting practice met for a state of the practice meeting conducted by our director of outsourced accounting. our prior director left and we were looking for someone when one of our newbies asked if he could be considered.
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the 25-year-old had one year of experience, and we were chasing a controller-type person. the whole outsourced practice was in shambles. revenue was nil and any clients we had were unsatisfied.
sometimes, the best decisions are made out of desperation. the newbie knew our software. he knew a little about taxes and knew our internal workflow systems. most importantly, he was excited about the job.
the newbie did so well after the first year that he earned a 10 percent ownership stake, as well as a raise. at the end of the second year, he was running the end-of-year state of the practice meeting. at the start of the meeting, the newbie handed out profit distribution checks. it took just two years and the right person. i got a check for doing next to nothing for a year. how? by hiring the right talent.
do you have to give the right talent money? yes. ownership? maybe – for great performance. compensate the best people accordingly. they’re great business partners. they give you money. effective practice management is putting the right people in the right places with the right resources at the right time. note the “right people” part of this.
you can have the best practice management software in the world. with the wrong people, you have a hot mess. better talent reduces work in progress (wip) as better people require fewer hours to perform tasks. better talent also increases capacity as your firm accomplishes more, both in terms of services offered and sheer work completed.
how do you acquire great talent?
first, stop thinking of small firms as undesirable places to work. what do small firms offer that large firms can never touch? the chance to make a difference. what do millennials say they want more than clean water, clean air, lower carbon dioxide levels and affordable lattes? a chance to make a difference. in reality, that’s number two after salary, but it’s still a really high priority.
small firms make a difference in clients’ lives. they help clients hire workers, afford college educations and fund retirements. very few people and organizations make the difference in lives that accountants and cpas make. small firms are great places to work. newbies learn about more than just taxes and bookkeeping, as important as those skills are. they learn how businesses work – and how they don’t. they’ll pick up skills more quickly that are more useful than any they’ll learn with large employers.
here’s how to put that huge advantage to work.
if you have hired primarily low-level, cheap staff, you have some work to do before you begin hiring better talent. first, you have your present staff, because you’ve been keeping your prices low. you can’t afford better talent unless you make some changes. with low-performing staff, you are like a third world subsistence farmer who is always just one misfortune from disaster. when someone quits in january, as poor staff are likely to do, you get to work 100-hour weeks for yet another tax season. like those farmers, you need fundamental change. subsistence farmers need a mindset change that readies them for new technology to compete. you also need a mindset change to ready your practice for new ways of operating.
to afford better talent, you need better clients. if you have 200 clients and can’t afford to lose the bottom 20, you have a marketing problem. if getting one new client a month feels normal, you aren’t replacing bad clients with good ones. thus, you can’t afford better quality staff.
you need a pipeline of continuous potential clients contacting you all the time. this isn’t going to be free, either. you need a target market and a plan to attract your target clients. try working with a local marketing expert with experience working in the cpa and accounting world on a contract basis. as with most new initiatives, there’s a significant likelihood of failing with your first marketing effort. learn from the failure. don’t give up.
next, raise your prices. once you begin building a pipeline of better clients, you can let your bottom-feeding clients go away. hopefully, you won’t need to fire them; they’ll just go away on their own. until you start making good business decisions about keeping or not keeping clients, you’re just like any other third world subsistence farmer: you’ll always be just one step ahead of starving.
in multipartner firms, if one partner is perfectly happy with the existing situation but the other two partners see the need for change, it’s time to read the operating agreement and figure out the price of a professional divorce. this happens all the time for issues besides revenue growth. let the partner depart the firm with his or her clients. you probably don’t want them anyway. additionally, let the partner take some staff. the staff who want to work with the departing partner are probably pretty bad. you know who they are. they’re the preparers who need to print out last year’s tax returns before preparing this year’s. they’re the admin people who tell you clients will never accept tax returns as pdfs. clients want paper.
once you have a good new client pipeline in place, it’s time to fish in a better talent pond. determine what you need to pay for better staff and what benefits you need. most major payroll services usually have free surveys available. affording competitive benefits is tough – especially health insurance. good staff will leave over bad health insurance. the stakes are high.
there are some benefits decisions that are easy. get rid of the old simple or sep retirement plan. most advisors urge their clients to adopt 401(k) plan variants. if you don’t have any retirement plan, what message are you sending to staff? you recommend retirement plans for your clients, but not for your staff? this is how you end up with lousy staff. the good ones leave. the bad ones stay because no one wants them.
if you really want to differentiate yourself from other local firms, pay for training. rinky-dink local firms don’t pay for training. don’t be rinky-dink. training yields a great return on investment.
for example, consider spending $1,000 to send a newbie to advanced tax training in the offseason. you might not have to fix his basis worksheet on every schedule e the following tax season. what if the newbie only stays one more tax season and then leaves? you have spent $1,000 to increase his tax season billings by maybe $10,000. you increased his pay by $3,000 over the prior tax season. your rate of return on the $1,000 investment is $6,000. that’s a 6-to-1 rate of return. of course, your newbie may leave before tax season. in that case, you’re out $1,000 pure and simple. but if there’s a 50 percent chance that he stays another tax season, your expected return on your investment is $3,000, if you consistently make this bet. that’s a 3-to-1 expected return. there are no games in las vegas with that expectation of return. there are not many investments, period, with that expected rate of return.
finally, create a fun place to work. small firms do interesting work.
having fun should be easy when your staff does meaningful work. however, if there’s a lot of yelling going on in the office and people are bursting into tears, your office will devolve into adverse selection, where anyone who can leave will leave. you’ll be a subsistence farmer again.
if you feel the need to yell a lot, either you have an anger problem or the wrong employees. yelling won’t make bad employees better. replace them.
when staff only get criticism, they shut down and do even worse work. it’s much harder to yell at someone when you know their kids’ names and where they’re going to college. just try not to steal too much of your staff’s personal time. tax season is rough enough. building a better work environment is about creating a more human, friendly environment – a place where people can grow and enjoy life outside the firm as well as inside it.
last, it’s time to find a better pond for your talent. a lot of firms are finding better ponds overseas. however, because small firms don’t need to hire a hundred new staff, they can fish in places larger firms can’t. small firms can get creative. do any of your clients have kids in college studying accounting? think summer internships. what about community college grads? they can work for you while they study to complete their four-year degrees. this is a win-win. you win because you get reasonably priced staff. they win because they get an engaging, relevant work experience while they are studying.
hiring newbies isn’t foolproof. you’ll make hiring mistakes, but the mistakes will be less costly. you can also change a newbie’s attitude more quickly. they haven’t developed that six-inch-deep layer of skepticism about everything. they are capable of change. further, they won’t resume years of established bad habits in mid-march that don’t follow the workflow. newbies only know your system.
to summarize:
- better talent reduces wip and increases capacity.
- small firms are great places to work.
- lay the groundwork for hiring better talent with a full new client pipeline.
- get competitive with salaries and benefits.
- create a great work environment.
- fish in better talent ponds.
- hire younger people.