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Bissett Bullet: Saving for a Rainy Day

Today’s Bissett Bullet: “Debt leverage is a very risky business, especially for smaller firms. I appreciate that it’s not always avoidable, but proactively planning and saving for a rainy day is a far better strategy.”

By Martin Bissett

In an ideal world, if the unexpected occurs and you need to draw on an emergency fund, you turn to your cash reserves, the money you have saved to allow you to continue drawing from your business in the event of a temporary shortfall in income. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, those businesses with a three- to six-month reserve saved for a rainy day found that it didn’t rain quite so hard as it might have done.

The lesson? Be financially wise. Treat the funds in your business as sacred and plan for the unknown. You will sail through whatever emergencies come your way without accumulating debt to repay.

Today’s To-Do:

How much can you reasonably afford to save each month to build your rainy day fund? Plan to start doing so immediately.

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PRO Member Exclusive

Competence: First of the Seven C’s

BONUS: Eleven questions about your ambitions and finances.

By Martin Bissett
Passport to Partnership

Staffers aspiring to be partners must learn the key characteristics of successful partners. They also must learn how to develop their own personal plans to achieve partnership. Firms and staffers alike need a clear set of procedures, processes and milestones for turning top talent into the next generation of firm leadership.

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There are seven critically important criteria by which partners assess partners-to-be. I call them:

The Seven C’s

1. The first is Competence. As a prerequisite, but only a prerequisite, accountants must master their technical abilities and qualifications, whether it be audit, tax or management accounting. Whatever your area of specialty, as a staffer the partners expect you to be able to know at least as much as anyone else who may report to you.
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Bissett Bullet: What Exactly Does an Accountant Do?

Today’s Bissett Bullet: “Framing the conversation is a tremendously useful way of focusing a prospect on what the meeting is about.”

By Martin Bissett

When a prospective client walks into the first meeting with you, they think they know about accountants. In reality, they know a little bit about what their current accountant does and will measure you with the same stick. If you can do more for them, you need to educate them. Framing the conversation for a commercially minded business owner in terms of the outcomes you can achieve will help them to understand the true value of what you bring to their firm.

Explain that the purpose of the meeting is to find out all about them, but that you appreciate that they probably want to know more about you, too. Tell them about the business owner who you enabled to pay for their first vacation in years. About the client whose dream of early retirement was realized. Leave them with those stories spinning in their heads.

Today’s To-Do:

Every firm has resounding success stories, but very few leverage them to get across a sense of who they are. Find two or three relevant outcomes for clients of a similar size or sector for your next prospect meeting.

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MARKETING & SALES

Three Things That Rich Accountants Do

woman using calendar planner on tablet

Make them second nature.

By Martin Bissett
Business Development on a Budget

You may be thinking right now, “Well, very good, Martin, but we have finite time. We’re very, very busy people and we need to get business in the door, and therefore creation of opportunity becomes the issue.”

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Regardless of whether we’ve got 20 opportunities on our plate today or none, when the next one comes along we can’t afford to be anything other than confident, comfortable, assured relationship builders who have tremendous value to offer. Because people will see that body language, those voice tones and hear those words and it will be attractive. They will want to get to know more – they’ll want to be able to look at options. They’ll want to know what you’ll charge, and they’ll want to know what they’ll get for what you charge.
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Bissett Bullet: Look To The Future

Today’s Bissett Bullet: “In writing a proposal for a potential client, it serves us to remember that they want us to help them create history more than record it.”

By Martin Bissett

Because we are so used to providing compliance work, we are used to looking in the rear-view mirror. Our prospective client, however, wants to look out of the windshield to where we are going. So, let us make sure that our proposals represent a forward-looking view more than they do a historical-looking view. The prospective client takes the recording of the past as a given. They want to know where they are going with us in charge.

Today’s To-Do:

Today the action point is this. Before a meeting with a prospective client, make sure that our agenda is future-focused, not historically focused.

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