Clients find accountants’ tech skills lacking. By Rick Telberg CPA Trendlines As small and medium-sized businesses move increasingly online and adopt technologically integrated accounting systems, many tax and accounting firms will need to evolve or face extinction, according to a … Continued
Building a bridge to somewhere…
by August J. Aquila and Robert J. Lees
Creating the Effective Partnership
The more that partners are engaged with the firm’s future the better they perform. So, the picture of the firm’s future has to be compelling. It has to persuade people that they want to play a part in making it a reality.
More on partnership management: Nine Rules to Creating Highly Effective Partnership Teams | Audacious Vision and Grand Purpose Prove Essential to CPA Success | Are You Creating a Sustainable Firm? | The Debilitating Effects of Denial at Accounting Firms | The Five Psychological Hurdles that CPA Firms Must Confront Today
Nearly all of the firms we know agree with the sentiment but getting the partners engaged isn’t always easy. So, how do firms go about engaging the partners and making sure they remain that way? READ MORE →
Ask not what you firm can do for you…
True partners start by asking themselves what they can do for the firm. And, of course, that means what they can do for their other partners, After studying more than 700 firms and canvassing almost every year for the last 14 years, Marc Rosenberg has some ideas. Eighteen to be exact. READ MORE →
Sometimes change is improvement – sometimes it isn’t. But it’s always inevitable.
By Bruce W. Marcus
Professional Services Marketing 3.0
The movement to replace hourly billing with value billing is accelerating. Firm mergers, consolidations, new boutique firms that bear little resemblance to the historical professional firms, new technology that makes obsolete technology that was itself only months old. It seems that observations (I don’t make predictions) that I made decades ago about the need to go outside the firm for new sources of capital to finance growth have turned out to be accurate. New accountant-and-marketer partnerships are springing up. Professional Services Marketing 3.0 is in full swing. READ MORE →
When to let the next accountant take the losses.
Ed Mendlowitz, CPA, ABV, PFS
Author of “Implementing Fee Increases“
Question: A client of 10 years was paying a fixed fee that was now a little less than half of our time charges. Also, there had been a gradual scope creep with additional services being forced on us without any extra fees. The CPA had not received an increase in six years because of the client’s constant complaining that the fee was too high. The client just told us they had a quote from another firm that was half of ours, and said if we didn’t match it, they would leave us. What should we do? READ MORE →
Start with an Excel spreadsheet.
By Sandi Smith Leyva, CPA
It’s quite common for accounting firms — even the regionals — to have no marketing plan in place. The marketing plan might very well be, “get as many referrals as we can.” Or it might be a number for each partner — which is not a marketing plan. Or it might be, “if it’s not busy season, I’ll go to my networking group.” None of these are plans. They are individual marketing tasks and components.
The number of companies that do not have fully functioning marketing plans is certainly not surprising because marketing by CPAs was illegal – and considered quite sleazy — in most U.S. states until about the 1970s. So we are a profession that has always been behind on our marketing skills.
Now that most of us need to market, the relief is we can do it on our terms, using Excel spreadsheets, with a bunch of numbers, adding in some deadlines, and creating a very organized process, just how we accountants like things.
So here are seven components of the kind of marketing plans I like to create. We start with an Excel spreadsheet. READ MORE →