Art of Accounting: Retreats for small firms

Enjoy complimentary access to top ideas and insights — selected by our editors.

Retreats are an effective way to develop growth and strategic plans for accounting firms. I believe most of the very large firms have annual retreats, while few small firms do.

There are basically four types of retreats:

1. The partners go on a trip and hang out, play a lot of golf or tennis, go to great shows at night, and have fantastic meals with little or no business planning.
2. Ditto, but they hire a top speaker to make morning presentations. This eases their consciences, creates the rationale for the trip, but does expose them to some of the latest thinking.
3. A serious meeting with a thoughtful agenda with the intention of coming up with a game-changing plan.
4. A fourth method is to have retreat types of discussions as part of the partners’ multiday participation in a national conference.

These all have pluses and minuses. However, those who seriously want to improve their practices and move forward into what’s next, or could be, or should be next, opt for No. 3. Those are whom I am addressing now.

When you have a retreat, one of the partners, usually the managing partner, prepares the agenda and conducts the advance planning and questioning, and these can be very effective. However, it consumes considerable time for the managing partner and sometimes lacks an “outsider’s” perspective and facilitation that keeps the meeting on course with possible exposure to new ideas.

An alternative is to engage an experienced consultant to conduct the retreat, make the advance preparations, including interviewing the partners, finding out what’s on their minds, setting an agenda, maintaining a focus for the retreat, and then following up on the implementation. This can seem costly, but when measured in terms of a percentage of annual revenues, it is usually not significant versus the potential benefits that can and usually flow from these retreats. By way of comparison, it is not unusual for an investor to pay an investment manager a percentage of assets being managed. So, why not look at the retreat’s cost as a fee to manage the asset of your practice?

A workable alternative is to join with one or two similar firms and engage a facilitator. If you are paired with a firm in a different part of the country, you can pick a central location or hold a virtual retreat. When you join with another firm, you need to make a decision if your financial information will be kept confidential or made available to the other participants. If the information is shared, open discussions could be very meaningful.

If you are interested in learning more about a joint retreat, let me know and I’ll consider additional columns on this. I can also send you reprints of prior postings on retreats. Email me at GoodiesFromEd@withum.com and just put “Retreat” as the subject. If you are interested in learning more about the fee to manage the asset of your practice I recommend Unlocking Private Company Wealth by Z. Christopher Mercer where his book explains his 1 percent solution.

Do not hesitate to contact me at emendlowitz@withum.com with your practice management questions or about engagements you might not be able to perform.

Edward Mendlowitz, CPA, is partner at WithumSmith+Brown, PC, CPAs. He is on the Accounting Today Top 100 Influential People list. He is the author of 24 books, including “How to Review Tax Returns,” co-written with Andrew D. Mendlowitz, and “Managing Your Tax Season, Third Edition.” He also writes a twice-a-week blog addressing issues that clients have at www.partners-network.com along with the Pay-Less-Tax Man blog for Bottom Line. He is an adjunct professor in the MBA program at Fairleigh Dickinson University teaching end user applications of financial statements. Art of Accounting is a continuing series where he shares autobiographical experiences with tips that he hopes can be adopted by his colleagues. He welcomes practice management questions and can be reached at (732) 743-4582 or emendlowitz@withum.com.