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.
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)
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 →
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