Bill Penczak, Author at CPA Trendlines

Secret to Success? A Growth and Abundance Mindset

Transformation Talks: Mike Maksymiw, CPA, CGMA, says the secret to success and transformation in accounting is to be willing to learn, believe there’s enough work for everyone…and allow yourself to be vulnerable.

^ Click to play video | > Play the podcast and follow CPA Trendlines Podcasts on Apple Podcasts here or grab the RSS feed here.

Transformation Talks
With Bill Penczak
Center for Accounting Transformation

After 16 years of working in firms, Mike Maksymiw, CPA, CGMA, was done.

He went to his employer with his concerns about wanting to do something else. Instead of encouragement to pursue another area in the firm, he was persuaded to remain on the partner track he was on. Maksymiw decided he’d rather move on.

MORE on Aprio: Why Tax Work Yearns To Be Free | The FinTechFlood: Accounting Will Never Be the Same | Top Issues for 2022: Talent, Time and Transformation | What’s in a (Firm) Name?

MORE: Five Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid | Five Post-Tax Season Growth Ideas | Five Better Ways to Say No | Are You Solving Your Clients’ Problems? | Five Ways to Grow: Talent New Service Lines | Business Development and Sales Aren’t Scary
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“I didn’t have anywhere to go when I left. I just knew I needed to go,” he said. “So, after, you know, a couple pandemic busy seasons, learning about the Cares Act, being a national leader at the firm at that, like I was toast. So, my family and I just went to Hawaii stayed there for two weeks.”

From Tax to Transformation

Transformation Talks: Paul Mueller, CPA, took a leap of faith when he left a national accounting firm at the apex of his career to start a new firm serving small- and medium-sized businesses.

^ Click to play video | > Play the podcast and follow CPA Trendlines Podcasts on Apple Podcasts here or grab the RSS feed here.

Transformation Talks
With Bill Penczak
Center for Accounting Transformation

Paul Mueller was at a crossroads. As a national manager for the tax group of a large firm, he should have felt like Leonardo DiCaprio, yelling, “I’m the king of the world!” Yet, something just wasn’t right.

MORE: Five Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid | Five Post-Tax Season Growth Ideas | Five Better Ways to Say No | Are You Solving Your Clients’ Problems? | Five Ways to Grow: Talent New Service Lines | Business Development and Sales Aren’t Scary
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Today, he is the managing director of his own firm, Mueller Pye & Associates, CPA LLC in Loveland, Colo. His is a story of a late-life career transformation.

Takeaways

There is life—a really fulfilling one—after a departure from a large national firm into a small firm in rural Colorado.
In order to effect transformation either as a firm, or as a professional, it’s important to have a support network you can trust and open up to about your challenges
While firms do a great job of advising their clients on succession planning, that’s not always the case for themselves.

CLIENT SERVICE OPPORTUNITIES

Five Steps to Building Advisory Work

Both the who and the how.

By Bill Penczak

The nirvana (in the esoteric sense, not the Kurt Cobain context) for CPA firms is to provide “higher value” work for their clients, which traditionally means guiding them with process improvement, predictive analytics on business drivers, or taking proactive measures to reduce risk or tax burden.

MORE: The Six Essential KPIs for Managing Partners | 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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It is a career builder for your staff and a noble aspiration for the industry.

But while I have heard managing partners talk about the notion of higher value work, when pressed, they are often at a loss as to what that work would be, and more importantly, whether their mid-level and junior-level staffers (or even partners) have the true skill set to move into the major leagues.

The burden of meeting compliance deadlines weighs heavily on most staff, and they are weary from deadline pressures of clients’ immediate needs to consider much else.

Perhaps this is the opportunity to help chart your best and brightest to the next level, not only for fear of losing them to industry or another firm, but because as a firm leader, it’s the right thing to do.
READ MORE →

CHECKLIST

The Six Essential KPIs for Managing Partners

Proper planning prevents poor performance.

By Bill Penczak

We have all heard the term, “working in the business” instead of “working on the business.” I would suggest that most managing partners and senior leadership fall more into the “in” than the “on,” given staff turnover, busy season deadlines, exhaustion, and advancing years of many managing partners.

MORE: The Great Resignation: Five Reasons Accountants Are Quitting | Five Tips for Better Decision-Making | Your Marketing Sucks: Six Reasons Why | Five Global CPA Leaders: Four Survival Strategies | Are You Too Generous with Your Write-Offs? | It’s Time to Herd your Highly Compensated Cats | Nine Smooth Moves to Build Client Satisfaction | Five Tough Questions for These Tough Times | I Started A Consulting Practice the First Week of March 2020

I’ve endured enough management committee meetings during which the course of conversation leans more heavily towards rat-holes than addressing key firm issues of people, technology, quality, risk management, and growth. At the end of the day, every decision you make as managing partner foots back to one of those areas. Deciding on the venue of the Holiday Party does not fall into that category.

Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant, summed it up succinctly: Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

Here are six ideas that managing partners should contemplate when it comes to running an effective and engaged firm: READ MORE →

CHECKLIST

The Great Resignation: Five Reasons Accountants Are Quitting

And five strategies for addressing attrition – before it strikes.

Gauging the Staff Shortage:
How are accounting firms adapting?
Join the six-minute survey. Get the answers.

By Bill Penczak

Firms are getting nervous and with good cause. As they plan for the 2022 busy season, audit and tax departments are realizing they may not have the resources to staff their jobs already on the books, much less any new work that comes about in the fourth quarter of 2021.

MORE on THE STAFFING CRISIS: The Digital Toolset for Hiring at a Small Accounting Firm | Learning How to Hire amid COVID | How COVID Rewrites the Rules for Recruiting | New COVID Strategies for Staff Recruiting and Retention | IRS Has Recruiting Problems, Too | 12 Signs It’s Time to Outsource | How Aging Boomers Impact the Accounting Profession | Why Remote Workers Need Retreats |

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There’s been a lot written in the past few months about the Great Resignation, but the turnover problem in CPA firms has been endemic before the pandemic. One recent report finds that turnover in the top 50 firms is 17%, and one in every six firms experiences an annual turnover of 20 percent or more. That means that one out of five people who attend the busy season kickoff event won’t be around for the next one.

Here are five reasons your people are quitting your firm for other firms, for a job in industry, or to become a citizen of the gig economy and work virtually from a beach in Thailand:

LEADERSHIP

Five Tips for Better Decision-Making

Follow the principles of collaborative conversation.

By Bill Penczak

I recently encountered a decision-making process that had grown virtually foreign to me during my decade in public accounting—collaborative conversation. In the course of a week, the dynamics of communication with a prospective client reminded me of how most successful companies operate, and how the decision-making process at many CPA firms can be flawed and even sometimes dangerous.

MORE: Re-Thinking Today’s Firm with Five Global Leaders | 5 Things Your Firm Should Do Differently This Summer | Do You Have the Guts to Beat the Covid Crisis? | How to Inoculate Your Firm against Covid Competition | ‘Found Money’ Delights Clients | The Three R’s for Beating the Corona Crisis

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A friend and former colleague in public accounting, a veteran of the software industry, used to lament about the days of working for a “real” company the people who actually knew about the issue were those involved in decision-making.

MARKETING & SALES

Your Marketing Sucks: Six Reasons Why

Want new business? Avoid these errors.

By Bill Penczak

It’s an understatement to characterize CPAs as process-oriented, with prescribed steps for financial statement audits and tax return preparation that follow a specific regimen. Among the many jokes about accountants, the one that resonates here is:

Why did the auditor cross the road?

Because he looked in the file and that’s what they did last year.

MORE: Re-Thinking Today’s Firm with Five Global Leaders | 5 Things Your Firm Should Do Differently This Summer | Do You Have the Guts to Beat the Covid Crisis? | How to Inoculate Your Firm against Covid Competition | ‘Found Money’ Delights Clients | The Three R’s for Beating the Corona Crisis

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But the “funny” thing is that while CPAs are typically pedantic about the processes for client work, it’s often a case of the cobbler’s shoes when it comes to running their firms in general, and practice development in particular. READ MORE →

CLIENT SERVICE OPPORTUNITIES

Five Global CPA Leaders: Four Survival Strategies

Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to spur fundamental change, and that’s what we’re seeing today.

https://cpatrendlines.com/2020/08/05/5-firm-leaders-on-how-covid-19-is-changing-their-thinking/ — **New imperatives, from the U.S. to Spain, Australia, and back:** McConnell, Fay, Tomasi, and Majchrzak.

By Bill Penczak

The combination of the summer doldrums and the COVID shutdown has provided some firm leaders pause to get in touch with their right-brainedness.

MORE MARKETING in the COVID ERA: 5 Things Your Firm Should Do Differently This Summer | Do You Have the Guts to Beat the Covid Crisis? | How to Inoculate Your Firm against Covid Competition | ‘Found Money’ Delights Clients | Don’t Buy a Rolodex, Buy a Process | The Three R’s for Beating the Corona Crisis | 6 Reasons Why Your Marketing Sucks |

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These are difficult times for the economy and the industry, and while some firms hope to return to the good old days, COVID and other societal changes may cause a long-overdue sea change in the accounting industry, which has been doing the same thing the same way for more than 100 years.

Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to spur fundamental change, and that’s what we’re seeing today.

Here’s what you’re looking for: Bill Penczak

^ Click to play video | > Play the podcast and follow CPA Trendlines Podcasts on Apple Podcasts here or grab the RSS feed here.

^ Click to play video | > Play the podcast and follow CPA Trendlines Podcasts on Apple Podcasts here or grab the RSS feed here.