Today's Features
MARKETING & SALES

Are You Marketing or Selling?

Woman explaining financial brochure to man

Both must serve the client first.

By Ed Mendlowitz

There are differences between marketing and selling.

Selling is a process whose goal is an actual order. Marketing involves the totality of presenting the company to the prospective customer so they want to do business with you.

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Salespeople need immediate gratification. Marketers take a long-term view.

Both are necessary for successful growth.
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MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS

What Goes Into M&A Valuations

Overhead view of people solving a large jigsaw puzzle

Plus vetting candidates.

By Domenick J. Esposito
8 Steps to Great

Let’s take a deep dive into what you need to know about merger combinations, which are as much about the addition of talent as they are about the addition of clients.

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CPA Firm Valuations

The two typical valuation components in most merger combinations are capital and goodwill.

  • Capital is straightforward: It is a firm’s accrual-based capital adjusted for the fair market value of fixed assets, work in process and receivable reserves. It is paid as cash or a note (in some cases the note bears interest), over a relatively short term.

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MARKETING & SALES

Six Metrics for Successful Marketing

A spreadsheet and a checklist go a long way.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

One way to help accountants embrace marketing is to fill training sessions with spreadsheets and numbers, things that most accountants love working on. There’s a lot of insecurity around learning marketing, but when accountants hear they need to do some spreadsheets first, they dive right in.

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Here are six numbers I suggest you track:
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ADVISORY & CONSULTING

Focus on the Impact of CAS/CAAS

two men talking across a table, one holding a sheet of paper, window and brick wall in background

Stop describing what you do.

By Hitendra Patil

You know the story.

  • You painstakingly created your client accounting services (CAS) offering. You may have also created your client accounting and advisory services (CAAS) offering.
  • You and your team worked intently and intensely to get there. Your early adopter CAS clients seemed enthusiastic about the promise of your CAS/CAAS offering.
  • However, you soon found that it was becoming increasingly challenging to acquire more CAS/CAAS clients.
  • All the pieces are in place to create a thriving CAS practice, but the results are worrying.

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What’s missing?

Selling advisory can feel awkward, but that’s because it’s not meant to be sold like a product. This article repositions how you present Advisory-CAS, not as a service line but as a shift in how clients grow. We will also cover how to stop “selling” and start aligning with the outcomes clients already care about most.
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GROWTH STRATEGIES

Jason Blumer & Ian Vacin: How Any Firm Can Scale | Gear Up for Growth

Why chasing clients isn’t always the right answer.

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Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher

“Success doesn’t have to look like going up and to the right,” says Ian Vacin, co-founder and director of partnership relationships at Karbon, in this episode of Gear Up for Growth, hosted by Jean Caragher, president of Capstone Marketing. “You have to understand what you want as a firm owner, align your revenue with your resources, and build the scaffolding to support that complexity. Otherwise, profitability falls, and you may not recover.”

MORE Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | MORE Gear Up for Growth here

Gear Up for Growth is tailored specifically for public accounting firms with up to 100 team members looking to expand their practices intelligently and efficiently.

MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network here

Vacin, along with Jason Blumer, founder and CEO of Thriveal and Blumer & Associates CPAs, wrote the new book, Scale with Purpose: The Service Entrepreneur’s Guide to Intentional Growth. Drawing from research involving hundreds of firms worldwide, Blumer and Vacin reveal that only about 5% of firms successfully navigate their first major growth phase without setbacks. The authors emphasize that organizational design must precede capacity planning. Without thoughtful structure, firms hit predictable scaling plateaus, particularly between 8 and 20 employees.

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