karen reyburn wants accountants to stop thinking “about marketing as this one-off thing where you tick little boxes,” but instead about the ways you can use your marketing to connect to the human experience. her company, the profitable firm, or pf for short, has been helping accountants with their marketing since 2012.
in reyburn’s view, marketing is closely connected to the business. “if you have a marketing problem, you have a business problem. if you have a business problem, there’s often a marketing solution that can help with it.”
this book springs out of a pf coaching group called the accelerator, where participants were guided through a process of creating a structured approach to content marketing that made their marketing better. reyburn and pf take a collaborative approach to marketing. “we don’t do marketing for people,” she explained. “we do marketing with them.”
new zealand doesn’t have a tax season. this is largely because all tax returns are due one year after the standard march 31 year-end for businesses and individuals. but also: fewer than 20% of individuals actually need to file a return.
“the returns that accounting firms are filing are for business owners and people with more complex investment structures,” says giles pearson, ceo and co-founder of accountests, an online knowledge-testing company that focuses on recruitment, selection and development assessments for chartered accountants, accounting graduates and candidates.
pearson adds that while a few do wait until the last minute, “the reality is for a lot of smaller firms here, by january, they’re literally twiddling their thumbs.”
this is something that pearson suggests the aicpa and the profession could be lobbying congress to adopt in america. alas, the profession has been trying for years, to no avail.
jina etienne wants accountants to stop hiding behind our green eyeshades and all the stereotypes we share as cpas. she practices “fearless inclusion,” which is the freedom to be yourself and to create the space for others to do the same.
“inclusion happens because of how i show up and the space i make for others,” etienne said. she added that the fearless part means we need to be brave and bold while also interacting with others thoughtfully. when we show our personalities and our humanity, “that fixes a lot of things, actually,” she explained.
chris vanover is on a mission “to make accounting and auditing better.”
initially, auditclub helped firms mainly with quality control, but over time that grew into offering fractional support on a subscription basis to audit firms that can’t find the talent they need.
audit firms are challenged to plan a year or even a month out, so auditclub offers members weekly access. this weekly flexibility allows auditclub to take a concierge approach to help their member firms out a week at a time. plus, vanover may have the secret sauce to getting employees to perform at their optimum levels daily.
by age 35, jason deshayes, cpa/pfs, cfp, cka, was already co-owner of a cpa firm in albuquerque. he “hit the magic shangri la that we’re all working for.” but it wasn’t right for him. he was bored with the long hours and felt he wasn’t growing. he wasn’t able to think about his firm the way he wanted to. so he and his partner sold their firm.
today, he’s coo at cook wealth, a hybrid wealth management and tax firm. providing both types of services means that they don’t deal with “this weird thing, where the client’s in the middle, and they have to be the conduit for information going both ways.” he says that getting his cfp has “been so enriching.” deshayes added, “i love what i do, and it’s because i was willing to drop stuff so other people could learn the stuff i learned, and so i could do fun stuff.”
click “play” to see: what jason deshayes talks about when he’s talking about a “forward-thinking enterprise.” (via wordclouds.com)
heather satterley is well-known for being an accounting tech expert. but tech isn’t the only skill accountants need today and for the future. “you can have great technology skills, but if you don’t have people skills and those softer skills, that’s going to be a problem,” she said.
one of those softer skills that will be a key skill for the future is problem-solving, which requires keeping an open mind to “look at not just facts and figures, but look at tools, resources, people and pull them all together,” she explained. no one can be an expert at everything, so having “a wide network of really awesome professionals” is vital for filling in any gaps “to get the job done.”
too many accounting firms have “smart people doing stupid work,” according to bill penczak, a veteran sales and marketing professional. the founder and chief insights officer for mica ventures said to think about the effort it takes to get an accounting degree and get your cpa, and contrast that with the years of mindless work that many new hires are required to do, especially if they go into audit, he said. “one of the reasons why there’s such a talent shortage is because the market has figured this out,” and no one wants to do that stupid work, penczak said.
besides making smart people do stupid work, penczak said many of the firms he works with are realizing that they need to do a better job with mentoring and career development, as well as simply having more conversations with their people.
as shareholder and president of boomer consulting, sandra wiley has been speaking with firm owners and leaders for nearly three decades and clearly sees the need for change in the profession.
“the business model that was built before cannot be the business model that you have going forward. it simply doesn’t work,” wiley said. “now, we’re still living in the old business model,” and we have to get out of it.
when she does exit interviews to find out why people are leaving a firm, she said they all say it’s because of the hours. they need to find more balance in their lives, and they need to work less. while accountants do have government-imposed deadlines for tax returns, there are ways to reduce hours, wiley explained. we can do extensions to spread the work out over time and people, and we can outsource. most importantly, we can be more selective in the clients we work with. “we don’t have to work with every client we’ve ever worked with,” wiley said. read more →
al anderson has been trying to change audit for nearly his entire career and has always been “willing to try things differently.” while he’s always loved auditing – and thinks to this day that auditing can be fun – what he didn’t love was “auditing by doing it the same way every year.” however, he sees far too many firms performing audits the same way they have for decades. anderson believes that “the firms that are unwilling to change eventually are going to be history.”
in an effort to combat the rising tide of commoditization of audit and assurance services, anderson has been teaching a revolutionary framework for audit leadership to auditors around the world and has now written a book (to be released later this year by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间) that describes the five attributes of this framework.
when scott scarano lost a few good people at his firm, he had an epiphany that he needed to change things. instead of continuing to grow for the sake of growth, he overhauled his management approach.
“and things are better now at the firm, because we’re not focused on growth,” but instead on “growing everybody,” including himself, scarano said. by building better habits and finding better ways to do things, his team is growing its bottom line, and a few of the people who left earlier have now returned. “that’s the growth i like to see.” read more →
jody padar, the author of the radical cpa, has been shaking things up in the accounting world for years. but today, firms are at a boiling point, limited by supply and demand. “you only have so many people doing the work. and what are you going to do? you can’t make the work up. it’s got to get done,” padar said.
the old business model was taking whoever walked in and billing by the hour. but today, we don’t have the capacity. “there’s so much work out there,” she explained. “i have not heard any accountants say that they are looking for work. they’re all saying, ‘stop, go away. i don’t have the resources to serve you.’” read more →
ira rosenbloom has been working in the m&a space for accounting firms for over a decade and says it’s a complicated and exciting time in the m&a space today. “we’re seeing a lot of things that make sense, and a lot of things that are frustrating because they make sense, and a lot of things that make no sense,” he said.
staffing problems on both sides are forcing buyers to be far more selective about the firms they consider buying.
today’s buyers are different in many ways than the sellers. first, rosenbloom explained, baby boomer sellers tend to like to talk to people, while the younger generations looking to buy firms are “more selective in their communication.” younger buyers tend to be more entrepreneurial, and “the more that the seller comes across as an entrepreneur, the more interested the buyer is going to be in what’s going on,” he added. buyers are also interested in firms making a break with old methodologies and sellers who “want to invest in the long game,” rosenbloom said. read more →
peter margaritis, who also calls himself the accidental accountant, grew up in the gregarious environment of restaurants, “where everybody communicated, not well, sometimes, but they communicated.” so it was a shock when he went to work at price waterhouse, and he “felt that all the air got sucked out of the office, and nobody was communicating at all, and they looked at me like i was crazy.”
his crusade for the last decade or so has been to help accountants improve what we often call soft skills, but which he calls power skills: the ability to communicate clearly and effectively with others. “there’s nothing that will slow you down more in your career than a poorly written memo or email or a presentation that you were poorly prepared for,” margaritis said. read more →
exclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.
