CPA Trendlines

2006: What You Need to Know Now

Finance and accounting professionals are casting a wary eye on next year. Get the forecast, with key benchmarks, when you join the new survey.

by Rick Telberg

Finance and accounting professionals are closing the books on a tumultuous 2005. They are going into the New Year with moderate confidence in the economy overall, but stronger confidence in their own organizations, not to mention themselves and their families.

So we consulted our favorite economic prophet, Professor Rosie Scenario. To be sure, Ms. Scenario isn’t always right, but we’d rather talk to her than her arch rival, Dr. Doom.

As the last month of 2005 dawned, economic prognosticators and stock market investors were buoyed by clues that the economic gloom following hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the surge in energy prices was brightening. Instead, 2006, predicted to be a year of slowdown just three months ago, began to take on brighter prospects. If Professor Rosie is right again, it’ll be the fifth year in a row of economic growth, at a rate nearly on pace with this year. READ MORE →

Happy Holidays . . Now Get Back to Work!

Finance and accounting professionals aren’t alone in feeling overworked. It’s a national epidemic. See how you stack up by taking the survey.

by Rick Telberg

First, the bad news: Your workload as an accountant or finance professional won’t let up any time soon.

The good news? You’re not alone.

In fact, current reports show that about 33 percent of college-educated male workers are regularly booking 50 or more hours a week working. That’s up from about 20 percent a quarter century ago.

Wait, it gets worse: About 40 percent of Americans are sleep-deprived – getting less than seven hours of zzz’s a night; and that’s up from about 33 percent just four years ago.

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6 Deadly Marketing Mistakes

Shannon Curtis of Grunt Marketing reveals the

90% of small businesses make that stop them from reaching the next level.

(I-Newswire) – According to industry feedback each year approximately 4 out of 5 new businesses fail to make a profit and shut their doors. This amazing attrition rate is nothing new and is typically a reflection of the bad patterns of behavior within the small business marketplace?

This percentage begs the question: Why do so many people ?fail? in business when the majority of the time they deliver a ?quality? product or service? Says Shannon Curtis, a Geelong based marketing consultant. ?The real issue is a lack of good marketing. Most people just don?t understand how to attract and retain customers. You can have the best product or service but what good is this if nobody knows about you, or the reason why they should purchase from you.

Shannon says most businesses become ?me too? businesses. ?They usually end up slugging it out in a price war, because there is nothing unique about them to establish value in the minds of their prospects?.

To have an outstanding business that delivers the wealth and lifestyle you seek, ensure you don?t make the following 6 Deadly Small Business Marketing Mistakes.

1. Working in your business instead of on your business. 50-60% of your time should be spent on income producing activities, 20-30% of your time on marketing activities with 20% or less time spent on everything else.

2. Failure to create & use a marketing plan. Studies have shown that businesses that consistently use a marketing plan are 70% more likely to be in business in 7 years time.

3. Failure to implement systems. Optimize & automate every potential area of your business. If you?re managing around people not systems read the best seller The E-Myth by Michael Gerber.

4. Forgetting to market to your existing clients. 60-70% of your marketing budget should be directed to your existing clients. Each month you fail to communicate with your customers their propensity to do business with you drops 10%.

5. Not testing or tracking your marketing efforts. If you don?t know where your new business is coming from you can?t quantify your marketing, or your return on investment. This leads to many small business owners becoming advertising victims. Whatever you measure, you can improve.

6. Not following up with your prospects. Marketing studies indicate that the average sale happens after the 5th attempt. Successful businesses have a process in place that automates the follow up process ensuring they are following up with prospects regularly.

Shannon Curtis is the principle of Grunt Marketing. Small Businesses who are struggling to attract new customers use his ?5 Steps to Business Success? program to quickly and easily improve their sales and profits. He offers a FREE lifetime subscription to his ?Explosive Marketing for Real Results? newsletter at www.gruntmarketing.com.au and can be contacted on 61 03 5245 7107.
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7 Small Business Marketing Tips

by Bob Leduc

Here are 7 low-cost but highly effective marketing tips to help any small business find customers and generate sales quickly.

1. Don’t Advertise Like a Big Business
Big businesses advertise to create name recognition and future sales. A small business can’t afford to do that. Instead, design your advertising to produce sales …now. One way to accomplish this is to always include an offer in your advertising – and an easy way for prospective customers to respond to it.

2. Offer a Cheaper Version
Some prospective customers are not willing to pay the asking price for your product or service. Others are more interested in paying a low price than in getting the best quality. You can avoid losing sales to many of these customers by offering a smaller or stripped down version of your product or service at a lower price.

3. Offer a Premium Version
Not all customers are looking for a cheap price. Many are willing to pay a higher price to get a premium product or service. You can boost your average size sale and your total revenue by offering a more comprehensive product or service …or by combining several products or services in a special premium package offer for a higher price.

4. Try Some Unusual Marketing Methods
Look for some unconventional marketing methods your competitors are overlooking. You may discover some highly profitable ways to generate sales and avoid competition. For example, print your best small ad on a postcard and mail it to prospects in your targeted market. A small ad on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your website or generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost.

5. Trim Your Ads
Reduce the size of your ads so you can run more ads for the same cost. You may even be surprised to find that some of your short ads generate a better response than their longer versions.

6. Set up Joint Promotions with Other Small Businesses
Contact some non-competing small businesses serving customers in your market. Offer to publicize their products or services to your customers in exchange for their publicizing your services to their customers. This usually produces a large number of sales for a very low cost.

7. Take Advantage of Your Customers
Your customers already know and trust you. It’s easier to get more business from them than to get any business from somebody who never bought from you. Take advantage of this by creating some special deals just for your existing customers …and announce new products and services to them before you announce them to the general market.

Also, convert your customers into publicity agents for your business. Develop an incentive for them to tell associates and friends about the value of your products or services. An endorsement from them is more effective than any amount of advertising – and it is much cheaper.

Each of these 7 marketing tips provides a simple, low-cost way for any small business to find customers and generate sales quickly.

Copyright 2005 Bob Leduc

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Bob Leduc retired from a 30 year career of recruiting sales personnel and developing sales leads. He is now a Sales Consultant. For more information about *BizTips from Bob*, a newsletter to help small businesses grow and prosper, visit his web site at http://BobLeduc.com or call: 702-658-1707 after 10 AM Pacific Time/Las Vegas, NV

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10 quality questions

My Groups | Dans_CCCemails Main Page

“It is not enough to do your best, you must know what to do and then
do your best”.

“Does experience help? No! Not if we are doing the wrong things”.

“Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival”.

“We should work on the process, not the outcome of the process”.

Some insightful quotes from Deming.

==============================================================

1. An amazing web site (& more below).

http://www.nqi.ca/

2. You should study megatrends occasionally to ensure you are
focusing your efforts on the right (possibly) long term environment.
This new paper “The Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services”
provides some thoughtful identification of key trends and what to
do – to prepare and participate in them.

http://searchCIO.com/r/0,,50215,00.htm?track=NL-257&ad=538429

3. Another megatrend (at least in my view) is the adoption of
quality and continuous improvement efforts (in general) as the key
mantra for long term business success.

Quality management systems have been around for over 30 years. Six
Sigma practices has been in place for over 20 years. Lean
manufacturing has been adopted world wide for over 15 years (in many
organizations). Quality awards continue to grow – Are you ISO
certified?; Are you accrediated?; Do you have a certified quality
system?; Does your product or service met the market’s quality
standards?; and on and on.

4. Provided below is a 20 question “warm up” test from the National
Quality Institute (of Canada)’s Quality Fitness Test (QFT) regarding
your preparedness for continuous improvement efforts and where your
gaps and opporutities might be.

5. Finally, check out NQI’s long term efforts to improve quality.

www.nqi.ca

Enjoy,

Dan

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NQI’s Twenty-question warm up quiz – (re continuous improvement).
=================================================================

1. Is a strategic plan in place, reflecting quality principles and
incorporating improvement objectives, and have we communicated it to
all levels.

2. Are the trends in key measures of performance positive?

3. Do we gather, anayse, and evaluate information to determine the
neds of clients and stakeholders?

4. Do we full agreement at all levels on the important of client and
stakeholder satisfaction?

5. Is it easy for clients to provide input on their needs, to seek
assistance and to complain?

6. Are the levels and trends in client and stakeholder satisfaction
good?

7. Do we identify, prioritize, and measure issues, and set
improvement goals?

8. Do we conduct formal quality assessments?

9. Are systems in place to recruit, develop, recognize and assess
people, and do we take steps to minimize the effects of any
restructuring?

10. Do we identify training and development needed to meet goals in
our improvement plan, and do we respond to these needs?

=========================================
Please just let me know if you want to
receive the other ten warm up questions.
=========================================

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YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS

Visit your group “Dans_CCCemails” on the web.

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
Dans_CCCemails-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.

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Whatever Happened to the Paperless Office?

In Fact, While You Weren’t Looking, the Paperless Office Has Arrived.

The demand for paper used to outstrip the growth of the US economy, but the past two or three years have seen a marked slowdown in sales – despite a healthy economic scene.

“Old habits are hard to break,” says Merilyn Dunn, communications supplies director for InfoTrends/CAP Ventures, a market research firm in Weymouth, Mass. “There are some functions that paper serves where a screen display doesn’t work. Those functions are both its strength and its weakness.”

In the early to mid-’90s, a booming economy and improved desktop printers helped boost paper sales by 6 to 7 percent each year, according to the Monitor. The convenience of desktop printing allowed office workers to indulge in printing anything and everything at very little effort or cost, the paper said

But now, the growth rate of paper sales in the United States is flattening by about half a percent each year, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Between 2004 and 2005, Dunn says, plain white office paper will see less than a 4 percent growth rate, despite the strong overall economy. A primary reason for the change, says Dunn, is that for the first time ever, some 47 percent of the workforce entered the job market after computers had already been introduced to offices.

“We’re finally seeing a reduction in the amount of paper being used per worker in the workplace,” says John Maine, vice president of RISI, a pulp and paper economic consulting firm in Charlottesville, Va. “More information is being transmitted electronically, and more and more people are comfortable with the information residing only in electronic form without printing multiple backups.” In addition, Maine points to the lackluster employment market for white-collar workers – the primary driver of office paper consumption – for the shift in paper usage.

The real paradigm shift may be in the way paper is used. Since the advent of advanced and reliable office-network systems, data storage has moved away from paper archives. The secretarial art of “filing” is disappearing from job descriptions. Much of today’s data may never leave its original digital format.

But the paper-makers aren’t sitting still. For example, Xerox Corp. is developing electronic paper: thin digital displays that respond to a stylus, like a pen on paper. Notations can be easily erased or saved digitally. Anoto Group is working on a system to allow notations made with a stylus on a page printed with a special magnetic ink to simultaneously appear on a computer screen.

But, keep in mind that videoconferencing was expected to cut down on business travel. So far, at least, it hasn’t. Business travel is up. READ MORE →

Do You REALLY Know Who You’re Hiring?

Job Hunting When You Have a Criminal Past
by Dona DeZube
Monster Finance Careers Expert

Give me your name, birthday and an Internet connection, and in five minutes I’ll know if you’ve been arrested, convicted or imprisoned in Florida. So will any employer who knows about the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s computer database and is willing to spend $23 for a criminal background check.

There’s not much left to personal privacy these days, and if there’s something criminal in your past that you’d like to hide from a potential employer, don’t get your hopes up too high. While there’s no national database employers can check for felony convictions, plenty of states make residents’ criminal background information available. What’s more, an employer can check federal court records online using the PACER system, to see if you’ve been involved in civil or criminal court cases.

Crime can even affect your employment when you’re the victim. For instance, some states allow employers to dismiss at-will employees who are victims of domestic violence, if they’re thought to create a risk for coworkers.

They Need to Know

Who can blame employers for wanting to know if they’re about to hire a convicted embezzler as their next CFO? A company that doesn’t do background checks may be liable if it hires someone who commits a violent act, steals from a business partner or sexually harasses coworkers.

If you have personal contact with customers, cash or commodities, it’s likely you’ll run across a background check as part of preemployment screening or even after you’re hired. Some companies even do criminal checks during annual reviews, and if something turns up, you’re terminated.

What Can They Check?

Most states have laws about what’s fair game when checking criminal histories. A state may allow employers to look back only five years, or to consider felonies but not misdemeanors. Some states also seal juvenile records.

In most cases, the crime must be related to the job for your history to be used against you. In other words, will you be placed in a job where you would be tempted to commit the same crime? Will a company hire a convicted embezzler as an accountant or to answer calls in the customer service center?

Many states also bar employers from considering arrests rather than convictions. Some states, though, say it’s OK to ask about a crime for which you’ve been arrested but not yet tried if trust is important in your field (such as real estate, where you have access to people’s homes).

Should You Disclose an Arrest or Conviction?

If you were arrested for underage drinking in another state and never convicted, chances are the employer will not find a record of it. But if you were sent to a state prison for embezzlement and want to work as an auditor, that’s a different story.

You can call your state’s Department of Labor and ask about local preemployment screening laws. You’ll also probably be informed in writing before any criminal background check. So if a criminal past is going to ruin your chances of landing a job, you can always bow out at that point.

Another option is to hire an investigator to check your background first. For $30 to $50, someone like Patrick Wilkins, president of Professional Investigative Consultants in Abilene, Texas, will comb through public records in areas where you’ve lived. For a higher fee, agency employees will knock on your former neighbors’ doors to chat about you. Investigators are listed in your local phone book.

In some states, you have the right to see everything the human resources department has in your personnel file, including the results of criminal background checks. That includes any files former employers have, by the way.

Mitigating Factors

Some employers will consider mitigating factors. There’s a difference between a single instance of car theft 35 years ago when you were a kid and a dozen convictions for car theft. What you’ve done since your conviction and the rehabilitation you’ve completed may also come into play.

If you’re unsure about what an employer will check, ask. The more you know, the better you can prepare yourself with a suitable explanation.

Records Employers Check

Credit

Criminal history

Driving

Education

Federal and state courts

Military service

Social Security number

State professional licenses

Workers’ compensation READ MORE →