Resources Connection, spun off in 1999 by Deloitte, now has 60 offices around the world and employs more than 2,500 accounting, technology and business professionals.
The formula: Delivering some of the same high-end consulting services and professional pedigree that the Big Four offer. The company’s hourly rate ranges from $70 to $90 depending on the kind of service. That’s about 20 percent less than the Big Four. Projects are staffed by senior professionals who have an average work experience of 18 years and often have MBAs and CPAs. And the firm calls its services “internal” consulting, which means the firm’s associates act more as temporary workers than as outside consultants. Source: East Bay Business Times
NASDAQ: RECN, about $19 sper share.
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The answer may determine the future of your firm.
by Rick Telberg
At Large
One of the weightiest issues burdening the CPA profession today is the problem of CPA firm succession.
In essence, this generation of firm owners, most of them baby-boomers, are reaching retirement and discovering, unlike the generation before them, that there may be few qualified or interested CPAs interested in buying their practices. In short, it’s fast becoming a buyer’s market for CPA firms.
Now there’s a new look at the problem by Bill Reeb, a CPA and consultant to CPA firms, who says people are looking at the wrong end of the problem. Instead of working to get the best price for what you have, according to Reeb, owners should be working years in advance to build businesses with enduring enterprise value.
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?AT LARGE: CPAs Battle Banks for Business? reported on how community banks seemed to be muscling in on CPA services like tax prep through their trust departments while they are reducing their reliance on CPA-prepared financial reports.
But most CPAs are more worried about clients doing the work themselves and the power of technology to take away business. READ MORE →
Samantha Deeder, Director of Marketing, Miller, Kaplan, Arase & Co., LLP, North Hollywood, Calif., reports on CPA firm marketing trends with a West Coast perspective…
[See also: MAP SUCCESS: 7 Top CPA Firm Marketing Trends and MAP SUCCESS: Molinar on Marketing]
TOP 3 TRENDS:
1. The evolution of the marketing department:
At our local AAM chapter (AAM Los Angeles) our meetings are often dominated by the challenges we marketers face as we continue to implement a true marketing culture into our firms. … READ MORE →
?Kathy? Anderson, CAE, of West Columbia, S.C., has been appointed CEO-executive director of the Florida Institute of Certified Public Accountants, where she worked for more than two decades from 1976 to 1998. She had served as executive director of the South Carolina Association of CPAs (SCACPA) since 1998. Anderson starts her new post July 1, immediately following the retirement of Lloyd ?Buddy? Turman, CAE, who has been CEO-executive director for the past 29 of his 32 years with the Institute. The South Carolina society has started a search for a new exec.
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Storage Area Networks are fast becoming the state of the art in connecting small offices.
By Rick Telberg
Special for HP
May 2005
With business generating more data every day to be stored, sifted and safeguarded, accountants are taking on the role of information stewards — guiding clients and companies through the vast array of servers, the core element in computer-based data storage, and in the networking systems that derive the greatest use of the servers.
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Accountants gird for new competition. How worried are you? Join the survey.
by Rick Telberg
At Large
for the AICPA
For CPAs already competing with banks, or worried about losing clients to them in the future, a new market competitiveness report sponsored by the American Bankers Association’s Community Bankers Council may be a healthy reality check.
CPA firms are growing increasingly concerned about competition from beyond the accounting field, particularly from financial institutions and other financial and business services providers. But the ABA’s study is a good news/bad news story. READ MORE →
If you’re not thinking about these top seven issues facing CPA firm growth, you’re not thinking.
Sally Glick, chief marketing officer at JH Cohn and president of the Association for Accounting Marketing, drew up these bullet points for us:
1 – Growth by merger, and becoming ‘regional.’ The impact on the firm’s infrastructure and the necessary changes to the marketing strategy (bigger firms = new marketing initiatives);
2 – The importance of market research and competitive intelligence;
3 – Branding and market communications;
4 - How to improve cross-selling (or cross-serving as some firms call it);
5 – The emergence of the marketing director as a part of the firm’s strategic planning team;
6 – Evolving from marketers to managers (many of my peers who began their careers as a department-of-one now manage teams of marketers as their firms grow larger – with the result being changing roles going from marketing to managing a marketing team); and
7 - Building strong vertical markets, esp. industry niches, across the organization
You can catch Sally and the best of accounting marketing at the AAM
Summit in June. Visit: AAM READ MORE →
