How To Outline Accounting Firm Goals
Speaker 1: Just a quick tactical follow-up question and I’ll ask Tim first, and I am very curious for Jody’s response as well, which is what is your cadence for strategic planning. Is this twice a year, is it July, is it December, is it one day, is it three and a half weeks, what is the time that you set aside to make sure that you’re outlining these goals? We’ll go with Tim first, and then pass it over to Jody.
Tim: Sure, I want to go back and visit, if we have time, when we talked about before, how do we hold our people accountable, and communicating and talking about conflict, because I’d like to speak to that, but as it relates to the cadence in our firm what we do, and I used to think it was cheesy when people would go and oh, we’re gonna have a firm retreat. Well, it’s only cheesy if you don’t do anything. If you just go there [inaudible 00:00:56], and you don’t follow-up on it. We build our budget and we define success for a particular year, and we call it [inaudible 00:01:06], it’s a consulting thing that we offer our clients and addition to doing it to ourselves, so we define what want them to be here to look at and what are the three to five things that we need to focus on to be successful in that particular year. We check in again in June, and then we have partner meetings two times, they’re bi-weekly, and we have firm meetings once a month to keep everybody in the loop, because everybody that works in the firm participates in some [inaudible 00:01:35] focus that we have, and that allows everybody to keep it engaged in what we’re doing. If we meet all our objectives, then we, at the end of the year, in addition to bonuses, we take a big trip.
Speaker 1: Oh nice, nice, and Jody what’s your cadence for putting together the strategic meetings and how do you operate those, and what time of the year do you typically do those in? Jody: I would say every morning when I dump out all of my ideas on my partner’s desk and I say okay, what are we gonna attack, no, because I’m that entrepreneur who would do 25,000 different things if I could, and so what we do is we dump them all out, and then we just revisit them, I’ll say weekly, monthly, whatever, and we prioritize them. It’s really part of the everyday strategy with us. It’s just part of our culture, is that we’re changing and moving, and I don’t necessarily believe you can handle a five-year plan anymore because I think in my world, it’s just crazy how many opportunities come my way and we’re always facilitating through them, so I know where my end game is per se, but I have no idea what road I’m gonna take to get there, and so we just keep it all out there and aha and we just keep prioritizing and reorganizing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that’s aha.il, I think some people are asking about that.
Related Articles:
Share this article
