leadership

are partner retreats really worth the cost?

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how to do it right.

here at 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间, ed mendlowitz answers some of the toughest questions practitioners can throw at him. he’s the right one to ask. after more than 40 years in the business – building his own practice, running the firm, and eventually selling it to a major regional firm, withumsmith+brown, where he remains a senior partner and consultant to professional services clients – he has the answers.

browse more from ed here:   audit reports without doing the work?  | should i really spend the time making checklists?   |  what’s a tax practice worth today? |  preparing to sell your practice in a few years? 13 things you need to know today     |    10 questions to ask yourself before you decide to add financial services to your practice   |  why selling your practice is not a retirement strategy | congratulations! you bought a tax practice. now what? | how accountants can keep the business when a client wants to sell theirs | 10 reasons clients don’t pay, and what to do about it | 13 reasons timesheets will never die

question: is there any value to a retreat? read more →

the seven signs of great leadership in a cpa firm

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how strong management spells the most reliable path to profits.

by marc rosenberg, cpa

if partners of firms across the country were asked what the key was to the success of legendary fortune 500 companies such as general electric, coca-cola, ibm and countless others, i’m sure that the words “strong management” and “strong leadership” would dominate their responses. yet, ask those same partners to evaluate their own firms’ management, and if they are honest, their responses would not be very flattering.

marc rosenberg
marc rosenberg

related: compensation issues for the new managing partner | 20 decisions for your firm’s new partner compensation committee | three ways to break partner gridlock in an accounting firm | what partners are entitled to, and what they’re not entitled to | how to make partner? | why accounting firm partners are “popping prozac like m&m’s” | more…

of all of the techniques for improving cpa firm profitability, none is more effective than strong management and leadership. yet, nothing is more elusive. why is this?

read more →

herding cats: change management for cpa firms

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eight good tips for getting everyone on board when change is scary.

change is inevitable. but with a crashing a crashing economy, it is also treacherous, which makes these suggestion from august aquila all the more urgent.

1. know where you want to go. what are you trying to achieve as a firm and a partner group? while it’s always difficult to address the elephant in the room, now is the time to take advantage of the economic turmoil and bring all issues to the table.

2. get others involved. if you are the only one in the firm who is pushing for the change, you might as well forget about it. when others get involved they also get committed. they provide you with feedback so that you can develop the best steps in the change process. read more →

what it means to be a partner

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11 tests to measure the health of your firm’s partner group. 

click for download

by robert j. lees and august j. aquila
new research report, instant download: leadership at its best: what successful managing partners do (pdf, 17 pages) 

partners are the culture in a professional service firm – what they believe, what they reward, what they do and how they do it determines what and how things get done. but, one of the problems we consistently hear about is the lack of clarity in what being a partner means. and, in the absence of clarity the partners typically fill the gap by doing what they think it means, with all of the differences of thought and behavior that inevitably brings. it’s these differences in behavior that result in firms failing to maximize their potential.

so, how do firms overcome this lack of clarity and ensure the partner group set the right example and consistently deliver the performance the firm needs to be successful?

in our over twenty years working with professional service firms, we have seen many attempts to provide greater clarity from sophisticated competency frameworks through balanced scorecards to highly personalized objective-based compensation systems. the problem is that none of them (or even all of them together) ever works well enough without the critical link between partner behavior and what the firm is trying to achieve and what the partners have to do to deliver it. only when that overt linkage exists and becomes part of every partner’s dna do any other initiatives have a chance of working.

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when a partner is unwilling to help

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maybe the problem is you.

here at 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间, ed mendlowitz answers some of the toughest questions practitioners can throw at him. he’s the right one to ask. after more than 40 years in the business – building his own practice, running the firm, and eventually selling it to a major regional firm, withumsmith+brown, where he remains a senior partner and consultant to professional services clients – he has the answers. we’re happy to have him at 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. send your questions for ed here, or chime in with comments below.

meanwhile, browse more from ed here: what to do when you lose your biggest client  |  congratulations! you bought a tax practice. now what? | how accountants can keep the business when a client wants to sell theirs | 10 reasons clients don’t pay, and what to do about it | 13 reasons timesheets will never die |

— rick telberg
president / ceo

question: my tax partner gives me a hard time when i ask her for assistance.  is there anything i can do to get her to be more responsive?

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