get “call me before you do anything” for 25 percent off with ed’s personal savings code “edsentme” here.
by ed mendlowitz
when i received my last two royalty checks, i was bothered that one of my favorite books sold very few copies. it is a great book, a really great book. the book is “call me before you do anything.”
ed’s latest handbook is 77 ways to wow! the handbook for small-business advisory services.
more ed mendlowitz in the 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 shop: how to build a stronger tax practice | implementing fee increases | 202 questions and answers: managing an accounting practice | the 30:30 training method | tax season opportunity guide | how to review tax returns
one time i asked my son andy to read something i wrote because i thought it was really great, and he replied, “you think everything you write is really great!” he’s right. i guess i do. but this is really great!
an incident i recall is about using the word really. back in the tax shelter days, a client was being audited and had deductions for about ten tax shelters plus a record deal he invested in that sold so few records he closed the company a month after it started. i overheard parts of my tax manager talking to the irs agent. each time a tax shelter deduction was questioned, he said, “that’s legitimate!” after the ten shelters were gone through, the agent pointed to the deductions for the record deal and “don’t tell me this is legitimate!” and the response was, “that’s really legitimate!”
anyway, i had a long, successful and lucrative life in public accounting. throughout my career, i left two groups of partners and formed a third that was eventually merged into withum 18 years ago with me and one of my partners still there as emeritus partners. our much younger partner retired a few years ago. we also bought a few practices and even hired a full-time salesperson who was not an accountant and brought in 35 clients during his first year with us. when we merged with withum, every one of our staff and admin people had started their careers with us, and this included a full-time marketing person. my two partners and i only had a total of 3,900 annual chargeable hours, so we were never overworked. we also never turned down a client, including an sec client, that caused our professional liability insurance carrier to cancel our policy because they did not want to insure any services performed for publicly held clients.
we did so many innovative things that the wall street journal wrote about some of them in a 1981 article. a 2001 article in the journal of accountancy about our innovative practice won its award for the best article that year, and my art of accounting series in accounting today won an award in 2018 for best in its category, beating out a big four firm that came in second. it seems we had a lot of staying power with fresh ideas and were recognized for it.
somewhere along the way, i developed an ability to write about what we did and published 30 books sharing my success stories and even a few things that did not work. one idea that a colleague learned from me generated $25,000 a year in fees for him starting back in the late 1980s, and for which we were only able to generate $125 a year in fees. he is still around, and so is our lone client that signed up for that $125.
卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 thought my stories were really great since they took my first 156 art of accounting columns [i reached the 500 mark in july 2023] and put them in a really great book. yet, it is not selling. i don’t know why, but i put the blame on the publisher’s promotional efforts.
if you read this book, i am sure you would get at least one idea that would add value to you and your practice. actually, i am almost 100% sure you will get more than one idea. those first 156 columns cover over 400 pages. this is a lot of very successful ideas told in interesting stories. and if you buy the book and skim it and do not think it will give you even one value-adding idea, then return it, and the publisher will give you a full refund. i know the ideas work because my partners and i did every one of them. for the ones that did not work, we stopped wasting time. one innovative idea generated so much business that we were able to spend $40,000 a year advertising these services. we stopped when the rest of the accountants in our area caught on to what we were doing, and the fees dropped, so we moved on to other ideas, including our partners’ network, which included over 2500 firms.
i really like what i wrote. the ideas worked. we made good money, had fun and got great satisfaction when our clients were successful following our advice and also seeing many of our staff that started with us either in their own practices, partners in large firms or retired clipping coupons.
order the book today, flip through the pages as soon as it arrives or is downloaded, and start becoming more valuable and having more valuable practice while working better and having more fun.
all the best,
ed mendlowitz
p.s. go to //www.g005e.com/shop/call-me/ and order the book. enter discount code “edsentme,” and you will get a special 25% discount. you can’t go wrong with this really great book!
(and 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 guarantees you’ll like it, or your money back. it’s a free 30-day no-risk review.)