It’s tax season right now, and you might be wondering if you even have time to listen to this podcast. It just might be worth your time to make next tax season, and the rest of your year, far simpler and more profitable.

This is our second time interviewing Jeff Borschowa from Maverick Business Academy. Last time we talked about building a better workflow, but this time we’re digging a little deeper into the fundamentals of value. Our topic of discussion is how accounting firms can get what they’re truly worth in a way that doesn’t bury you and your team with work. If you can get this paradigm shift in your thinking right, you can completely transform your business for the better.

We don’t want to spoil too much, so please take the time to listen to the conversation or read the summary below. Thanks for listening.

In this episode of the Growing Your Firm Podcast, David Cristello and Jeff Borschowa discuss:

• Why getting more clients isn’t the answer to better profits and less stress
• How grocery stores are a bad model for most accounting businesses
• Signs that you’re getting paid too little per client
• Destroying the fee-sensitivity mindset in your business and in your clients
• How you can go beyond bookkeeping and taxes to provide something more valuable

Additional Links:

• https://maverickfirm.com
• Our previous talk with Jeff about building a better workflow

What Is Your Worth?

When I consult with a new accounting firm, a typical symptom I see is burnout. They’re taking on more and more clients. They’re growing, but they’re working far too hard. They’re getting too much stress for too little reward.

Sadly, one of their first questions is to ask me how they can get more clients, or they ask if they need more staff so the firm can take on more clients. This is the wrong approach; it just adds fuel to the fire. Improving workflow is a better tactic, but it’s not the best tactic. What you need are better clients. But before you can get better clients you have to know what your worth is.

The Grocery Store Model

How would you describe the clients of a grocery store? They’re low margin, but high volume. In order to handle that volume, grocery stores need lots of staff to keep the shelves stocked and intricate workflows. It may look calm to you when you go in there but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes.

Let’s contrast this with a boutique store. High margin, low volume. Unlike the grocery store, a boutique store can take the time to explore what the customer really wants and solve their pain points. This extra attention lets the boutique store charge much higher prices.

I’m not going to say that every firm needs to be like a boutique store. Some firm owners do want to cater to the masses and they make a conscious decision to target that market. But what I often see is that my clients don’t make that decision on which markets they truly want to target. They’re a little grocery store, a little boutique, a little in the middle. They want to cater to everyone and this leads to burnout. It also leads to money getting left on the table.

This is reflected in their average fee per client. Quite honestly, this number is always too low if you haven’t specialized. I’ve had clients who want to get a direct payment system set up because they don’t want to lose the 2% margin on credit card fees. If this is you, I guarantee your average fee is too low. Why are we underselling ourselves?

Destroying Fee Sensitivity

There is a bad habit in this industry of believing that every client is fee-sensitive and they’ll jump ship for a cheaper price. This leads to a scarcity mindset that good clients are rare. It makes us worry about what’s the maximum we can charge without scaring clients away.

I want to propose a different mindset. What worth can you offer to your clients until you get paid what you’re really worth? This is independent of the client and all about what you can provide. If you’re meeting a new client and you’re expecting that you’re worth around $1,000 and the client has $5,000 to spend, I guarantee that most firms will leave that meeting with $1,000 because they’ve kept what they believe they’re worth.

I truly think most firms can increase their average fees by 50-200% and be better off for it. My firm has just interviewed four of our clients who did this and have told us they’ve been able to double their business, take long vacations, and experience far less stress.

So how do you raise your rates without causing mass panic?

Specializing In A Client Type

Raising your rates is a scary proposition because we’ve been lead to believe that we are a cost center for businesses. And if you are a cost center, then a business owner will want to squeeze as much value out of you as possible for as little as possible. The accounting industry has bought this line of thinking for too long.

Instead, we must orient ourselves toward the value we can provide our clients so that they can run their businesses better. We think that businesses just want a tax return done each year, but the good clients want more. They are eager to have those conversations about how they can make smarter business decisions. But if you don’t offer that value you can’t capitalize on it.

If you made a Venn diagram of all the services you offer and all the accounting services your clients want, you might be surprised at how little they intersect. It might just be taxes and bookkeeping. But if you can grow that intersection, then you’ll be able to provide more value and get more money from that client.

Why aren’t we helping our clients analyze margins and ratios? Where is our role in building their fiscal budgets? These are things that can help our clients grow over time.

That turns us from a cost center into an investment. And if you can show ROI over time, just think of how much more you could charge?

Start thinking about what else your clients need. When they ask you a question, is there a better way to approach their problem from an accounting perspective? This will require some stretching and some risk. Let’s take financial forecasting as an example. It’s easy to do tax returns because they’re all about past data and accountants agonize over being wrong about a forecast. The fact of the matter is that every forecast is wrong because all of the variables are changing so often. What they provide is a direction that the business is traveling toward and enables the business to make smarter decisions. That’s valuable and you can charge a lot for that.

If you do this well enough, you cut through any client’s fee adversity because you’re providing long-term strategic value. It’s no longer about the hours you put in but the value you deliver to the client. If you can separate your time from the outcome, clients will happily pay for the outcomes.

We, as an industry, have to stop thinking of ourselves as a cost center and start thinking about the value that we can provide to our clients beyond tax returns and balance sheets. We need to make ourselves an essential part of our client’s business planning. Thanks to our financial knowledge, we have a unique perspective on how a client’s changes might affect the future of their business. Let’s do something beyond the basics and get paid a lot more for it!

RELATED ARTICLES:

1. How to move into Value Based Billing, Going Paperless, and “Flat” CPA Firms? The Jason Blumer Interview
2. How To Generate Your First 100 Accounting Clients & Building Recurring Revenue
3. Chapter 5: Get Referrals and Attract the Clients You Want

The Best Ways for CPAs to Stay Sane During Tax Season

Interview with Vincent Porter

In this week’s Growing Your Firm podcast, we’re interviewing Vince Porter, president, and CEO of Porter & Company, CPAs. He was recently awarded the 40 under 40 award by CPA Practice Advisor. Our interview went over a broad range of subjects related to how he grew his business.  Here, he shares some of his secrets with us, like the special tax calendar that helps him and his firm stay sane during tax season.

In this episode of the Growing Your Firm Podcast, David Cristello and Vincent Porter discuss:

• Why you need to keep in contact with clients as a CEO
• The power of a project coordinator
• Building in a little fun into tax season to stay sane
• Why business coaching may be the best investment you’ll make in yourself this year

Additional Links:

• Vince’s website: http://www.mytexascpa.com/
• Vince’s tax calendar: http://calendly.com/portercpa
• Vince’s business coach: http://www.think2perform.com/

Transitioning From CPA To CEO

I started doing CPA work with what was then McGladrey (now RSM US), then started work with my father doing work at his company. At the time he had three employees. After a couple of years, I bought out his practice and grew it to our current size in about three years.

We don’t do anything particularly fancy. Just solid traditional CPA work. My goal within the next five years is to bring in around $2 million each year in revenue.  My story is similar to a lot of small CPA firms that want to grow up to a comfortable level. I want to share with you some of the challenges I faced and how I overcame them.

The first challenge was transitioning from a CPA role to a CEO role. When you’re down in the trenches as a CPA, you get to form a pretty good relationship with your clients. After a few years, you can start to see their ups and downs and share in their struggles. But when you move to the CEO role you can get disconnected from them.

I was fortunate that I had a hand in working with our clients in some fashion. That personal touch before I transitioned helped them adjust later when I passed off those accounts to my staff. Making a connection with my clients on a personal level is so important. If you are moving into an ownership or executive role, you have to take some time in your day to keep those connections going. Get out in front of them and shake their hands. Call them up and check in.

This isn’t just polite. It’s good business. It shows that you care about the health of their business, not just the revenue they’re bringing in. It’s a little like how a politician will work a crowd, but if you are reaching out in a genuine way then your clients will still feel served by your firm instead of feeling abandoned.

Consider A Project Coordinator

If you’re working to get into an executive role, it’s quite likely you know a lot of quirks about your clients that you use to smooth their requests. That knowledge isn’t easy to transmit to others. So when you take over that role, it can feel like you’ve lost a couple of good employees.

To get around that problem, I hired a project coordinator for my business. Their role is to coordinate work coming into the office, make sure all the documents our CPAs need are there, chase our clients down for more information if needed, and to follow up with them for further work. She and her team are much like a quality control team.

The CPA side of my business can focus on generating billable work without needing to chase down a bank statement or some other piece of documentation.

This is a role that I created after I learned about how law firms did things. This is something I learned from Chuck Wachendorfer, my business coach (more on business coaching below.) They have someone on staff who tees up the ball for the lawyer by doing all the document chasing. It’s the same idea in my firm. Plus, I can work with my project coordinator to develop processes for regular work, develop checklists for complicated projects like tax returns, and basically make everything as smooth as possible before a CPA touches the work.

Another advantage to this is that our clients have a point of contact that isn’t bogged down as much during the busy season. We’ve all had years where we’ve forgotten a client’s request during tax time because there are just so many other things to track. When clients feel like we’re on the ball or get ahead of issues by asking for things they missed, it goes a long way toward making them feel like they’re appreciated.

Staying Sane By Building Fun Into Tax Season

Every CPA knows that tax season is the busiest time of year. It’s not uncommon to work 12 hour days. Without a way to blow off some steam, it can really drag down morale at the office. A way that we help deal with the pressure at Porter & Company was to schedule in some fun into our workday during the tax season.

We pick one or two times a week from the end of January through April 15^th to do something fun and completely unrelated to taxes. Some days we tell jokes in the morning. Others we build little survival kits for tax season. We also mark the holidays in some way. It breaks up the monotony and grind of tax season.

We try to make these fun and silly, even corny. When you’re facing the pile of work at tax time, you sometimes need something completely different. My team likes the breaks in the slog and we’ve found that tracking the 75 days of tax season together really builds a sense of camaraderie. I invite you to give it a try at your own office.

Get Some Business Training

If you haven’t worked in a managerial or ownership role before, I urge you to get some training with a business coach. The skills you need to be a good CPA are different than the skills you need to run a business. I worked with Chuck for about three years on my business blind spots.

We would have a phone call twice a week where we would hammer out business goals and talk about the issues that I was facing with staff and clients. Having a neutral third-party to talk things out with let me express things I was struggling with without affecting my staff or clients. I got some truly excellent feedback and I would not have achieved the success I’ve had without his help. He helped me keep my eye on the big picture instead of the fine details.

I think it’s good for anybody in business for themselves to have someone they work with and they can trust and that can really get good valuable feedback as to what they’re doing. I do recommend that you choose a neutral party who isn’t vested in the success of your business.

One final tip I want to share is to start exercising in the mornings. It helps so much with the stresses of the day and you don’t have to face the treadmill after hours of crunching numbers and thinking about tax strategies. If you don’t already have an exercise routine, just take 10-15
minutes each morning to do some movement.

Transitioning from a CPA to a CEO without tanking your business is tough. I hope that some of these techniques that I’ve used in my business will help you with yours.

About Vincent Porter
Vincent Porter graduated from Texas State University at San Marcos with a Bachelor of Business Administration with a major in Accounting and Finance. In 2005 he joined the firm of Porter & Company, CPA’s where he currently serves as President & CEO.

Vince holds a Certified Public Accounting certificate from the State of Texas. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Texas Society of Certified Public Accountants. In 2018 he was named by the CPA Practice Advisor as one of the country’s top 40 CPAs under 40. He has been featured in CNN Money, The Street, and The Fort Worth Star Telegram on a variety of topics ranging from tax and accounting to business.

Vince serves on the Board of Directors for the Community Storehouse in Keller, Texas. Together, Vince and his wife, Heather, have five kids with ages ranging from 4 to 16 years old. Their family resides in McKinney, Texas. Vincent is an avid hunter, fisherman, cyclist, and sometimes triathlete and cross fitter. He is an avid fan of college football, professional football, and the Texas Rangers.

Learning how to grow your firm is the aim of our podcast, but there’s a certain point in your growth where you have to be able to step back and see where you’re going. For many firm owners, this can feel like an impossible task. We’re going to talk about a way to make it happen.

In this week’s Growing Your Firm podcast, we’re talking with Dominique Molina from Certified Tax Planners. She’s also the President of the American Institute of Certified Tax Coaches, a discussion leader for the AICPA, and a tax course instructor for CPE Link. Our discussion today is how you can “fire” yourself from your firm by implementing systems that will let your business run itself.

Before the tax storm hits too hard, you might want to think about her suggestions and how you might use them at your firm. We want to thank Dominique for spending some time with us and hope you enjoy the knowledge.

In this episode of the Growing Your Firm Podcast, David Cristello and Dominique Molina discuss:

• The trap of relying on one person, no matter what your end goal
• Why it’s better to work better, not harder
• The three things you need to work better at your business

Additional Links:

• https://certifiedtaxplanners.com
• Jackie Meyer’s podcast on focusing on a core product (mentioned in the podcast)

Build Systems To Fire Yourself And Get Free

It’s tax season right now. People in the accounting world often get overwhelmed during this time like their head is about to explode. For the unprepared accounting firm owner, it can feel even worse. You start your own business because you think you’ll be a better boss or it will be easier doing it on your own and then find out it’s much harder.

If you’re the one doing the work there’s no one to steer the ship. That’s a dangerous situation. These firm owners end up working for their business rather than on their business. This keeps their firms from reaching their full potential. It can even cause them to fail.

They have to learn how to fire themselves so they can step back and take back their business. The way to do this is to build systems for your business and trust them to work. Easier said than done! Let’s look at some of the challenges.

Depending On A Person

Here is a common trap I’ve seen. An accounting firm starts to take off because one or two people in the business are rockstars at their job. It could be the owner to start, but it often ends up being a hire. They knock it out of the park and the clients love their work.

An owner might want to push this rockstar employee higher. They may even want to turn the firm over to them when they retire. But what happens if that person gets sick or decides to leave for a new opportunity? Your magical unicorn employee is gone and you’re left with a shell of a business.

Investors learn how to smell this situation. If they can see that the value of the business isn’t in the business but in the work of an employee and their knowledge, they won’t buy or they’ll demand a discount.

If you plan on leaving the business as a legacy to your family you still have the same situation. You probably know stories of later generations getting a business then running it into the ground because the retired owner had all the knowledge or change things so that the competent employees leave.

There’s another danger that comes with relying on people. By and large, people do want to do right by their work but there are bad apples out there. People can steal client lists or do other sinister things. Combine this with the unreliability of life that can draw even the best worker away and you have a recipe for risk.

Better, Not More

Here’s another challenge for firm owners. How do you scale your business? The common idea is that you have to work harder. Put in more hours. Push your employees to do more. I like to take a different approach. I say that firm owners need to learn how to work better, not harder.

Better, in this case, means building systems that can handle all of the variables of a process and create something efficient and manageable. This doesn’t just have to be for your accounting products either. It can include things like onboarding, client communications, marketing, and so much more. It’s far less stressful to focus on better systems than more work.

The cool thing about this is that when you focus on making your systems better you end up with a better end result. You can raise your level of quality while reducing the amount of effort. There is a beauty in this that can make it quite exciting to go to work each day and see the systems functioning as they should to grow your business and increase your profits.

Where To Start

We live in an amazing time full of accounting and business technology. Building a technology toolchain is the first optimization that I recommend to accounting firms, especially smaller boutique firms. Technology allows us to do two things:

• Automate routine tasks
• Check to ensure that a job is done accurately and correctly.

If you can reduce inefficiency through automation and put in checks and balances to ensure that the endpoint of any product is accurate and correct, that’s a major win.

The second thing that I recommend is to figure out which products you should be offering. What I often see is firms offering whatever the public demands. Someone can come in and ask if you do international tax. The firm owner thinks they can learn it, says yes, and then gets overwhelmed trying to deliver on the promise.

It’s much easier and more lucrative to pick a hallmark product, price it a way that will lead your business to where you want it to go, and go deep into your expertise and knowledge of that core product so you can do the best job you can. Plus, it makes it much easier to do your marketing.

How do you choose? I look for two things. First, pick something you’re passionate about, something you love to study and do. Something you feel good about doing at the end of the day. For me, that’s tax strategy. I really feel like I deliver my ultimate value to my clients when I do this task.

The other thing is that you have to get paid really well for it. You have to take that skill you love and construct it in such a way that allows you to price it at higher than the typical market rate, and then you have to learn how to communicate the value your passion service provides to your clients so they’ll be willing to pay the higher price. If I just say that I charge $35,000 for a service, they’ll choke and I’ll never hear from them again. If I can communicate what I provide and how it will help them first, it makes the pain of the price much easier to bear.

And if you’re not doing the work you’re passionate about right now, it’s okay to change! It’s never too late to change. Life is too short. You can find something you enjoy doing and have your experience not go to waste.

The last thing is finding people who will support you and your vision. It’s tough to run any business on your own and you need more than just employees or contractors. Mentors, advisors, your peer group, and consultants are also part of your core team because they can understand where you are, help you see your blinds, and give you the advice you need to grow.

If you can get these three areas of your business aligned and systematized, you’ll be able to step out from under your work and look at where you’re going with clearer eyes, more profit, and far less stress. You don’t have to do it all at once. Try starting by mapping out your existing services, then map out your ideal process and see what you can do to bring them into alignment one step at a time.  Investigate technology to fix inefficiencies. Learn from your best employees so you can abstract their knowledge into a process. Little by little, you’ll have less to worry about during the day. Eventually, you’ll realize that you can step away and think about your business without it falling apart because you’re not in it. That’s where the fun can really begin.

RELATED ARTICLES:

1. Creating the Ideal Accounting Firm: Charge 80% More, 25% Less Client Work
2. Double Your Income by Getting Rid of Receivables in Your Firm
3. The Accounting Firm’s Blueprint to Creating A World-Class Team (Without Recruiting)

Everyone has the same number of hours in the day, but not everyone uses them wisely. There are dozens of little mosquitoes buzzing around us to suck the time out of our days. When you start to transition to a managerial role or begin to scale up, these little distractions like long meetings and controlling email can really get out of hand. What can you use to keep them away?

In this episode of the Growing Your Firm podcast, we welcome back Jason Blumer, CEO of Blumer & Associates and the CEO of Thriveal CPA Network. Jason is an advocate of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), a holistic business model with a set of simple tools and processes that will help your business achieve the results you want.

We’re just starting to use the process here at Jetpack, and we’ve brought Jason in to talk about one of its major techniques, time blocking, and how it can help you stop those pesky time mosquitoes.

In this podcast, we’ll cover:

• How Jason can schedule his entire year in advance without going insane.
• How time blocks force him to get work done and keeps other tasks and people from sucking his time away.
• Why this process may be a struggle for entrepreneurs, but will secretly give them more freedom.
• What he does when there is an interruption to the schedule.
• The differences between visionaries and integrators
• More about the EOS system and how it could help your business.

Additional Links:

• Jason Blumer’s LinkedIn page
• Gino Wickman’s author page (Traction, Rocket Fuel)
• Our last talk with Jason Blumer
• And our talk before that one!

Subscribe to the Growing Your Firm Email Newsletter

Get Your Time Back Through Time Blocking

One of the things that I and my business partner, Julie, do every year is to block out our entire calendars a year in advance. To many managers, this sounds like a crazy idea.

No business calendar survives contact with the clients or reality. Yet we’ve found that if we do it right it’s one of the most powerful strategic tools we have in our arsenal.
If you can get this right, you’ll have defined time for all the things you want to get done for your business, guard your time against interruptions, and still have enough flex in your schedule to take care of emergencies. Fair warning, this isn’t something that can be done overnight. It takes about three weeks to plan out our time blocking system for the year and there is a learning curve to working with time blocking. But I promise you, it’s worth the effort. Here’s how to get started.

What Do You Do?

The first thing to do is to define your calendar containers. A calendar container is a category of work tasks that you are responsible for completing. The first goal in this process is to define clearly what these broad categories are.

I usually end up with 8-10 of these each year, such as:

• Client meetings
• Internal meetings
• Sales and Marketing
• Content creation

Defining your containers doesn’t just tell you what task categories you’ll do each day. It also tells you what you’re not responsible for. As a CEO, my blocks tend toward visionary tasks. My partner Julie, on the other hand, integrates this vision into the business through day-to-day tracking of how our business processes are working. If you plan to use time blocking with your team or your business, there must be some strategy meetings to clearly define who will be responsible for what and what needs people share so that everyone is on the same page. For instance, I know I have internal meetings daily with Julie so I had to have an internal meeting block.

Define Where Tasks Go

Now that you know what your containers are, you’ll need to define how each of your tasks will get slotted into each category. You’re not filling the containers yet, just deciding which tasks go where.

This may seem simple but it can get quite hard. For instance, if I have a meeting about content creation, does that go into the content creation container or the internal meetings container? There is no right or wrong answer to this, but it needs to get nailed down not just for your sake but also for the sake of whoever has access to your calendar. If everyone is on the same page about what goes into each container before you start the system then there won’t be confusion later. A good place to start is to look through your calendar over the last year. How would you batch all those tasks and meetings if you had your way?

Decide Container Duration
The next step is to decide how many hours per week you want to devote to each of these categories and when you’ll do them. I might take four hours every Tuesday and Thursday for sales and marketing tasks, then a couple of hours at the end of every day for content creation, just as an example.

It’s at this stage that I start taking my calendar and inserting the containers, playing around with duration, and thinking about the possible big interruptions that could come during the year that may require changes in focus. If I know in advance that there will be a big marketing push a few months from now I can adjust the amount of time for my sales and marketing in advance.

If you’ve never measured how long it takes you to do your activities, you may be in for a rough surprise. Time blocking will force you to confront the real amount of time it takes to get your tasks done. Unless you’ve already done some time tracking work, give yourself far more time than you need. It’s easier to adjust down after you’ve had some time with a trial run.

It will also help to have a little padding between each of your container blocks, 15-30 minutes or so, to give yourself the opportunity to check email, use the restroom, and get a breather before switching to the next category. If you find that a task is taking longer than you’d like, you can also use this time to finish up before switching to the next category. We’ll talk about what to do when tasks explode beyond a container in a little bit.

Fill Your Containers

Once this is set, I go in and fill my containers with the tasks I want to do that match the category. I start with all of my recurring items, then think about how I will fill the rest of the time to fulfill the categories I want to complete.

Now, what if you’re looking at your first month and you see that your containers have spots of free time? That’s a problem! You’ve decided you’re going to spend so many hours per day on that category, you need to fill it up with activities that fulfill the category.

It’s tempting to go back and shrink the category down if you can’t think of anything, but this should be resisted. Part of my strategy review each year is to look at how many hours I spent in a category and decide if I need to spend more or less time with it in order to get the results I want from my business. But once I’ve decided on a duration, I force myself to fill the time with tasks. If I can’t think of something, I’ll go back to previous entries for inspiration.

Building In Freedom

If this process is scaring you because you’re hemming yourself in, you’re not alone. I had the same fear at first. But I found that this process gave me far more freedom than trying to multi-task and juggle my schedule around every day.

The reason is that I had to affirm exactly how I wanted to spend my day first and block out the hours for that time. If you respect your calendar containers, you will have the time to do the things that you’ve declared you want to do during the day. People who want to schedule meetings with me often have to do it a month or two in advance because all the meeting time I have for the week is stuffed.

Now, what if there are emergencies or opportunities that blow past the container and your pad time? What I will do is move the next container for that day into an unfilled part of the calendar. This is a conscious choice that I will ignore that block of activities to address the issue. This makes it my choice rather than my emergency to take care of.

In the podcast, I recommend some books that go into this process with much more detail. You can also find them in the resources section. Give this technique a try. You don’t have to go for a full year; try a month or two to start. Once you see how powerful it can be, you’ll want to stick with it.
RELATED ARTICLES

1. 41 Top Productivity Apps for Accountants In Busy Season

2. 5 Types of Toxic Team Members that Can Hurt Your Firm

3. The Top Applications We Use at Jetpack Workflow (Review)

Subscribe to the Growing Your Firm Email Newsletter

Tax season is upon us! Are you feeling stressed yet? CPA burnout is a real thing, but what if there was a way to significantly reduce the amount of stress you go through while still generating a lot of income? This week’s guest just might be able to help you.

Chuck Bauer is a sales trainer and business trainer who works with accounting companies to make their business practices efficient. Our friend Jackie Meyer recommended him for our podcast and we’re grateful for the recommendation. There are a ton of efficiency hacks that he shared with us. This post explains some of them, but there were others we couldn’t fit into the post. Listen to the podcast to get the full story.

In this week’s podcast, we’ll discuss:

• Why interruptions and inefficiencies are your enemies
• Why email is making your business 30% less efficient
• The importance of setting client expectations
• The reasons why so many CPAs end up with health problems from stress
• How Jackie managed to turn her business around with Chuck’s help in six months

Additional Links:

• Chuck Bauer’s website can be found at https://chuckbauer.com
• More About Chuck Bauer
• Creating the Ideal Accounting Firm: Charge 80% More, 25% Less Client Work

Focusing On Efficiencies To Generate More Revenue In Your Accounting Business

Tax season is here, and CPAs often work six or even seven days a week just to keep up with everything. By the time the season is over, they’re often burned out and hating life. Many of the people who come to me are suffering from chronic stress syndrome. It doesn’t have to be this way because you are responsible for your environment.

It is possible to grow your business and raise your level of success without driving yourself into the ground if you build your business in the right way. You can set up systems that will kill interruptions and inefficiencies dead while still growing your business.

The way to do that is to focus on how efficient and automated you can make your entire business, from top to bottom. That’s what I do for my clients, and I want to share with you some tips that you can use that can help put you on the right path.

Much of the stress that comes from your clients is due to overthinking or trying to keep too much in your memory. The less you have to think about to do your job, the better. Let’s take a look at email first.

Seek Out Interruptions And Kill Them

Interruptions are the enemy of productivity. Did you know that nearly every firm is 70% inefficient? Why is that? The United States Department of Labor says that 30% of our workday is spent inside of email. I would frame it that we keep getting interrupted by email. If you want a quick gauge of how efficient you are, look at how many emails are in your inbox. The lower the better.

Email is a great tool for marketing but to use it well inside the office takes effort. We must make it work for us rather than be slaves to our inboxes. Quite often what I do is set up a company-wide communication protocol that takes the guesswork out of sharing internal information. For instance, there may be codes used in the subject lines of internal emails that set priority, much like the ticketing systems used in IT departments. With consistent coding, it’s simple to set up filters that will bring the most important emails to the forefront. A unified procedure doesn’t just make it easier to think. It also makes your employees much more accountable.

Measure The Right Things More Often

It’s so easy to get buried in metrics and miss the most important things. Here are my rules for measuring the right things.

Which KPIs you use will differ depending on your exact business, but I like to use a 12 month moving average for your KPIs. There is too much variability month-to-month in accounting to trust a single month’s numbers. Once you know what to focus on, it just takes 10-15 minutes to review them at the end of the month.

One KPI that I’ve used that’s a little unusual is the number of fired clients per month. Every organization has clients that are awful for one reason or another. They could be low-revenue or they could take too much time, but either way, they’re dragging down the business. I like to set a target of five fired clients each month for the first six months. If that is done and you track net income so you don’t dip too far down, you can free your business from a huge amount of stress.

At the same time, your employees also need to know what their expectations are in relation to those KPIs. They need metrics. While I do look at standard metrics like realization rates and billable percentages, there are others that I look at much more often for the sake of efficiency. These include:

• How many tasks of different types did you complete?
• How fast were you able to complete them?
• How many tasks in your queue moved to an urgent status since the last measurement?

These are important because it shows how effective each employee is. It forces them to prioritize. I take two or three minutes at the end of each week to review these with my employees. Yes, I give weekly reviews! The annual review is a holdover from the mid-20th century. If an employee starts a bad habit two weeks after the last review and I don’t catch it till the next annual review, that’s a problem.

Exactly which task types and metrics you’ll need to measure will depend on your business and the employee, but once you know what you want to track and have taught your employees the targets you want to hit, try switching to a weekly review.

Set Expectations And Make It Easy For Clients To Follow Them

In my experience, there are some accountants who are addicted to the chase. They love tracking down documentation and wrangling their clients. They feel like they’re doing a lot of work. They could be doing so much more.

If you clearly set expectations for your clients about deadlines, documentation, or whatever it is you need to do your next steps, it would make it much easier to take on new clients, right? That is if they remember to follow them. Along with setting expectations, I also help clients build short videos to share with clients at different stages. Telling your clients how to use that portal, upload the right documents, and when the deadlines are through videos saves you from explaining it over and over. This also keeps a constant thread of communication open between you and your clients.

These videos need to be made with some care. They need to be simple enough that any of your clients can understand things, but also thorough and clear enough that you’ll never have to answer questions about it. Accountants have high analytical skills and sometimes think too fast for their own good. Just because you understand things doesn’t mean your clients will so pretend you’re new to all this again and explain it as your teacher would.

In fact, one of my clients lost a $9,000/yr account because they said they’d offer assistance with a tax organizer and failed to follow through on teaching how to use it. What they should have done is make a simple 5-7 minute video explaining how to use it that their client could watch at any time.

If you do this right, you’ll automate another part of your business. And If they still fail to meet your expectations despite your instructions, they just might be the next target for your fired client KPI.

Handle Your Emotions And Health

Enjoying your work isn’t just about setting up the right systems. You are also part of the system. When was the last time you took care of your health or your relationships? Was it only after tax season when you couldn’t take it anymore? I’ve had to fly clients to me because I was worried about their physical health.

You don’t have to become a fitness guru or eat a crazy diet. But you do need a little bit of exercise and get some good nutrition. Consider this part of your personal metrics.

Did you go for a walk today? Did you eat some real vegetables and avoid the soda? Did I spend time with friends and family?

All of these things affect your energy levels. We need time to recharge. Don’t neglect yourself!

Now Automate It

Once you have your procedures in place, automate them as much as possible. Leave as little to memory and trust in the systems that you’ve built. This will free you to focus on the things that really matter.

Please don’t feel that you have to do this all at once. My process that I take my clients through is at least a 6-8 month process. Shoot first for easy wins, like firing that awful client that’s always late with their documents. Try setting a code word for the most urgent and least urgent emails and include them at the start of internal subject lines so they can be filtered. Take some time for yourself. You’ll feel much better for it, your employees will too, and you’ll be able to earn a lot more income.

RELATED ARTICLES:
1.Creating the Ideal Accounting Firm: Charge 80% More, 25% Less Client Work
2. Lesson Seven: Where to Find Leads (Part 3: Partnerships)
3. Packaging Your Accounting Service: 30 Day Pricing