Six Ways to Create a Millennial-Friendly Firm

Your firm’s future depends on successfully engaging younger clients and younger staff. Here’s how.

By Frank Stitely
The Relentless CPA

Do you know why millennials can’t buy houses? Avocado toast is expensive. How many millennials does it take to change a light bulb? None. They accept it for what it is. Buy me a craft beer and I’ll tell you a half-dozen more.

MORE: Do You Know Your Turnaround Time?
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Now, here’s why you need millennials as clients and how they increase the efficiency of your firm.

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Five Questions to Ask Your Partners about Accountability

Three business colleagues arguing while seated at tableFive consequences when it’s lacking.

By August J. Aquila
What Makes a Great Partnership

Why accountability now?

Lack of accountability is not a new phenomenon. There are several factors that have caused accountability to become an important element of successful CPA firms today.

MORE:How You Can Get Partners to Change | The Seven Building Blocks of a Great Partnership

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The external environment has changed and firms find themselves in an environment of:

  • Scarcity of people. Finding good staff and developing future partners still remain critical problems for the profession. One of the key issues facing firms today is the lack of future owners. This problem has reached epic proportions that firms are requiring more of their current owners and staff.

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Teamwork Drives Firm Success

Underview of 6 businesspeople in a circle with hands in center in teamwork gestureA team can’t become a standout team by dictate.

By Anthony Zecca
Leading From the Edge

Leadership has responsibility and impact on creating a powerful and united team throughout the firm and an environment that motivates every single team member to their highest level of performance for the benefit of the firm, and not their own career advancement. Teamwork and not individualism is a cornerstone of a strong culture that results in achieving the level of a standout, high-performing firm.

MORE: The Two Sides of the Culture Coin | Four Accountability Steps for Firm Success | Assessing Your Firm | Incremental Vs. Exceptional Success | Is Your Leadership Team at the Edge? | Leadership Must Drive Culture
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In fact, a strong culture cannot thrive in an environment where silos exist, and individuals are more focused on what is best for their career versus what is best for the firm. Teamwork is not only a key aspect of the firm’s culture, but a key factor in driving the firm’s performance to become a standout, high-performing firm.
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OUTLOOK 2023: Authenticity Comes to the Workplace

CAS continues to be a huge opportunity.

By Carrie Steffen
The Rosenberg MAP Survey: National Study of CPA Firm Statistics

During the pandemic, sheltering in place is allowing s to be more human and ourselves.

MORE: OUTLOOK 2023: Private Equity Pumps Up Paychecks | Tech Automation Takes Hold | IRS Hires Will Add Pressures | Look Who’s Making Money Now | Capacity Strategies Drive Change | Top Five Trends | Compensation Gets Creative | The Office Is Over | Accounting Firms Face Up to Private Equity
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In marketing and sales and in managing relationships at work, we’re moving away from “personas” and toward “person.”  That will translate into more individualized marketing, supported by automation tools like email marketing.

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Do You Know Your Turnaround Time?

Cutting it is the shortest route to happier clients.

By Frank Stitely
The Relentless CPA

Todd Rundgren sang, “I don’t want to work. I just wanna bang on the drum all day.”

I agree with half of that. I don’t want to work. However, I want someone else to bang on the drum all day for me. I’m not that ambitious.

The key to achieving Hall of Fame-level laziness is delegation.

MORE: Tax Season Client Meetings: Kill Them Now | Leadership Growth is a Two-Way Street | 12 Subjective Factors for Pricing Your Next Engagement | The Six Pillars for Finance Transformation | Three Strategies to Keep Emerging Leaders Engaged
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If I have no ambition to do anything, but want things to get done, someone else must do them. Similarly, effective practice management is putting the right people in the right places accomplishing the right tasks at the right times. That’s a pretty damn good definition of effective laziness as well. There’s a subtle genius in that.

For example, our firm was looking at acquiring a really nice firm, where the two partners were working 100-hour weeks during tax season. As a result of the acquisition, they wanted to work fewer hours. They were preparing the vast majority of tax returns themselves, so we suggested having them act as reviewers instead. That would also transfer knowledge of the clients from them to us – a central objective of any successful acquisition.
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Five Ways to Put Success into Succession Planning

A robust mentoring program can be critical.

Three climbers helping each other up a hill

By Bill Penczak

Legendary General Electric CEO Jack Welch is reported to have lamented the choice he’d made in his successor, choosing someone based on their personality and ability to navigate the politics of the position instead of someone who could successfully lead the company into a brighter future. Welch was correct. Today, GE is a shell of its former self because of its leadership choice.

MORE: O.D. Lanier: Stepping Into Advisory | Secret to Success? A Growth and Abundance Mindset | Future Firm Growth Requires a Mindshift |The Great Resignation: Five Reasons Accountants Are Quitting | Five Global CPA Leaders: Four Survival Strategies | Planning for Success in 2021 | Do You Have the Guts to Beat the Covid Crisis?
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Welch’s one gaping failure as an otherwise stellar executive started me thinking about the current state of baby boomer-led and owned CPA firms, and how many of them are likely to commit the succession errors of GE. Or worse, do nothing at all in terms of creating and sustaining a CPA firm into its next iteration.

As firms are giddy with the prospect of a new year and with COVID in our rear-view mirrors, here are five considerations for generational succession of a middle market firm:

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The 12 Big Questions for 2023

Accounting leaders say these are the issues firms must face.

By CPA Trendlines Research

As Gale Crosley of Crosley+Consulting notes in the 2022 Rosenberg Survey, we are in the midst of “an unusual year of high uncertainty, unpredictability and sapped energy among our profession’s leaders.”

MORE TRENDS & OUTLOOK for 2023: The Biggest Change in Accounting? Personnel | Look Who’s Making Money Now | Merger Minded? Go Out on Top! |  Capacity Strategies Drive Change | Who Wants to Be Partner? Not Enough | Private Equity Heats Up M&A | Top Five Trends |  Compensation Gets Creative | CPA Partners Rejoice on Surging Fee Growth | The Office Is Over | Accounting Firms Face Up to Private Equity | IRS Hires Will Add Pressures | Consolidation Brings Challenges, Opportunities |

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Yes, indeed. The profession, once characterized as staid and stable, has been hit by a confluence of what Crosley calls “four major thunderbolts,” to wit:

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Jennifer Wilson: Empower Young Workers to Build the Firm Everyone Loves

Jennifer Wilson: Wanna Grow? Employ the 10% x Three Rule

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music and Audible, Player FM, Audacy, Gaana (India), and Boomplay (Africa).

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr 
for CPA Trendlines

Jennifer Wilson has been advising and coaching firms on better ways to run their firms for years, so she has had an inside view of how firms perform well or perform badly. Wilson said that building a sustainable firm that attracts and retains the best people and that the younger generation wants to own will require changes from how many traditional firms have operated.

MORE:  Mike Whitmire: Re-Think Your Hiring and Training PracticesHector Garcia: Success Strategies of a Quickbooks YouTube Superstar | Blake Oliver: Why Tax Work Yearns To Be FreePrivate Equity Explodes in U.K. | Brannon Poe: The Status Quo Must Go  | Accounting Nerds, Unlock Your Super Powers  | Disruptor: Jason Statts Shakes Up the Status Quo | Think Small to Think Big with Matt WilkinsonWhen Financial Statements Go Extinct with Corey SchmidtCan Geraldine Carter Save Accountants from Themselves?Re-Inventing Accounting with Tyler Anderson

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Though firms quickly switched to remote work at the pandemic’s peak to create a culture of “anytime, anywhere work,” many are now moving backward. Some firms are giving wishy-washy messages about returning to the office, which makes remote team members feel they have little chance of promotion. “Smart firms are not rolling backward right now,” Wilson said. They are finding ways to do “mass customization and personalization of schedules and workplaces” to make everything work for team members, work for clients and work for the firm.

This may mean making tough decisions to let clients or underperforming staff go.

PRO Members always get all the top takeaways, details on the guest, and the full transcript.

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