Ed Mendlowitz

Perhaps the most important staffing decision is to know when to hire your first employee. I believe this decision needs to be guided by your goals.

I do not believe the problem is how to manage the millennials; rather it is the myopic firm managers who need better management techniques.

Partners will rise to the task when faced with no alternative.

I have long advocated hiring entry-level people rather than those with two or three years’ experience.

I have always tried to run my practice as the business that it was. As such, I used certain numbers or metrics to evaluate how I was doing. I did this when I started out and every step along the way as my practice grew.

As a follow-up to last week’s column on determining what to charge, this column will explain a way to determine your hourly rate should you decide to bill using that method.

Almost every job has a value to the client. Try to uncover this and price the job, considering that value.

Most three-year people with a Big Four firm are disgusted with public accounting because of the way they have been treated with overly long hours, repetitive work on large clients in esoteric areas, narrow industry exposure, and being pigeon-holed in a single technical area.

Small firm accountants do it all, not just the wide variety of services.

Many people like the long Memorial Day weekend, especially as the days get warmer and longer, but please do not lose sight of the purpose of this day.

There are two types of accountants—those who do their work with blinders and those with wide-open eyes. Both can do competent jobs for their clients, but the ones with the wide-open eyes grow and can do far better work for their clients.

This program will be a wild ride on everything you need to consider.

I think branding is very important. Everyone and every business has a brand. Inattention to branding creates a brand that might not be what you would like, but nevertheless you will have a brand. Branding needs deliberate attention.

I write a lot about a lot of things. On technical topics I never get negative feedback—unless I wrote something wrong, which fortunately has been very rare, and then it is a gentle nudge that perhaps I overlooked or misread something.

Many firms fire staff after tax season. The reason being that they feel they needed to get through tax season and those who are not good are let go as soon as practical. I did it differently.

The annual life cycle for accountants traditionally ends and begins with April 15 (or whatever the actual due date is). The early months of the year are involved or consumed with tax season. After tax season ends, normality begins.

I never liked counting down months, weeks or days. To me, it makes the time seem to go by too quickly and decreases my appreciation of today.

When I started my practice I tried to extend as many clients as I could. I figured this would ease tax season and spread the work out throughout the year.

Some suggestions of ways to relieve pressure as you rush toward the last-minute crunch deadline.

It’s tax season and there will be some mistakes on returns you send to clients. Hopefully not many, but there will be some.