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Seven key filters to use.

By Anthony Zecca
Leading from the Edge

Now that we have completed an assessment of your leadership team and your leadership, the third leg is assessing the overall performance of the firm. This assessment, coupled with the assessment of the leadership team and your leadership, provides a strong foundation upon which to build the roadmap (strategies) for moving the firm from where it is today to a standout, high-performing firm. The underlying objective for this assessment of the firm is to have a factual basis for establishing a myth-free and accurate baseline of the firm by analyzing a number of key characteristics.

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What are the major areas of focus for the firm assessment? In center-led firms, the assessment of how well the firm is doing is generally focused around financial metrics. How much profit did we make? What was our growth? What was the change in average partner compensation? What profit percentage to revenue did we achieve?
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Clarity is the key.

By Anthony Zecca
Leading from the Edge

Many of you who are reading this might be too young to appreciate the story I share below about my childhood.

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I have always been a huge football fan. I played football in high school until a knee injury cut short my road to the NFL (just kidding), but my love of the game continues to this day. When I was a kid, there was a football game that I received one Christmas that I spent countless hours playing. The game was powered by electricity. The game board was designed as a football field, and there were 22 little plastic players that would form two teams. The players were about 2 to 3 inches tall, with a rubber piece on the bottom that had two flanges that you could move directionally and in theory affect how the piece would move on the board once the power button was hit.
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Eight forces that have altered the future of accounting firms.

By Anthony Zecca
Leading from the Edge

“All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they are now getting. If we want different results, we must change the way we do things.” – Tom Northup, author of “Five Hidden Mistakes CEOs Make”

What a great statement not just about accounting firms, but all organizations – “perfectly designed to get the result they are now getting.” There is another old saying that goes something like this: “If you want different results you have to do things differently.” Center leaders hold onto the status quo whereas Edge leaders constantly push the envelope of what is possible – pushing to the future edge.

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Leadership is a topic that has been researched, talked about, written about, training sessions built around, and endless models developed – yet it is also one of the most challenging issues in most firms today. Over my career, I have worked and consulted with leaders of all shapes and styles and firms that experienced varying degrees of success. Based on working with hundreds of companies, my conclusions – and two of the primary reasons that drove me to write my book – are that in many cases, firms are performing below their capabilities and every firm has the potential to reach higher levels of performance if and when leadership moves from the center to the EDGE. Edge leaders want to be at the top of the pack when it comes to all metrics that matter whereas center leaders are content to remain average.
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