10 Bad Habits Partners Need to Kick

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If actions speak louder than words, what does that say about your firm’s core values?

By August J. Aquila and Robert J. Lees

Creating the Effective Partnership

The concept of core or shared values gets a lot of press and most professional service firms’ websites promote their core values to prospects, clients and recruits. But, like so many management ideas that are on the soft side, they are often more talk than reality.

Creating the Effective Partnership:  Every Partner’s First Question: ‘What’s in It for Me?’  |  The 9 Building Blocks of a Winning Vision that the Big Four Have Discovered  |   The Politics of an Accounting Firm Partnership  |  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

For too many firms, their espoused core values don’t actually represent what the firm stands for and don’t guide individual behavior. Often, in fact, neither the partners nor the employees know the firm’s core values and no one in the firm is evaluated or rewarded on how well they live them. READ MORE →

Accounting Firms Launch New War for Talent

Firms are hiring, and many staffers are thinking about a job change.
Get more details, join the survey.

By Rick Telberg
CPA Trendlines

Now five years since the banking crash that forced record layoffs at tax and accounting firms, new survey results from CPA Trendlines Research show intensifying competition for talent, with more than 42% of accountants reporting that their firms are hiring and about half of all staffers ready to make a move.

Chris Hatcher
Chris Hatcher

“There’s a labor shortage out there,” according to Chris Hatcher, a partner at Louisville, Ky., Baldwin CPAs. “Finding good talent is hard.” Hatcher says Baldwin CPAs is looking for professionals with ambition, which he defines as an “owners  mentality.”

In this report, CPA Trendlines Research:

– Reports the percentage of firms hiring, cutting or holding steady on headcount in the next six to 12 months;
– Gathers comment from a representative sample of professionals on key economic and business trends; and
– Analyzes latent discontent in the ranks of staffers,
– Propensity to seek a job change, and
– Overall confidence in the job market. READ MORE →

Accountants and Six Fundamental Human Needs

By Hitendra Patil
Pransform

Celebrity Author Anthony “Tony” Robbins identified six fundamental human needs that everyone has in common, and states that all behavior is simply an attempt to meet those six needs.

These Six Human Needs are Certainty, Uncertainty/Variety, Significance, Connection/Love, Growth and Contribution.

As an accounting services provider, if you can identify the ways to meet these six needs of your clients (and your staff), if you can recurrently and consistently do things that lead to clients  (and your staff) actually experiencing the satisfaction of these needs, you are more likely to improve your firm’s performance. The question to ask is, “WHAT should I do to ensure that my services/products fulfill these needs of my clients?”

For now, let us focus on your clients. Here are some suggestions on what to do to fulfill six fundamental needs of your clients. READ MORE →