Our annual selection of a dozen tasks you can take on over the next 12 months to advance your firm.
Transcription:
Dan Hood (
Welcome to On the Air With Accounting Today, I'm editor-in-chief Dan Hood. This podcast is going out on the week between Christmas and New Year's. So we thought we'd give all the potential guests in the world some time off. And it's just me here with the microphone and our producer of course who's wondering why they didn't get the week off. Now we've talked pretty much endlessly on this podcast about the vast amount of change going on in the accounting profession and the pressure that puts on firm and practice leaders and really honestly everyone in the profession to continually adapt to a constant flood of new developments. And that can be very difficult as you can imagine, particularly given how many different areas and aspects of the profession are undergoing massive evolution and how many things people are told they need to do just to keep up.
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So to make it a little easier to get started it's a little bit of a holiday slash new year's tradition here at the start of the year to put together a to-do list of 12 things you can do to get moving with that adaptation to the future. That's 12 things, just one a month and they're bite sized so you can tackle them and complete them in a reasonable period of time while still doing all the million other things you have to do every day. Now, we thought about breaking this up into 12 days, kind of 12 days of Christmas thing but who has 12 days these days? And who needs all those pear trees and French? And unless those leaving lords and piping pipes can prepare a tax return, you don't want them around. Plus while Reddit, those eight maids and milking, that's great to have the maids. But you know what, that also means eight cows, right? Because they're are milking and what are they milking? They're milking cows and who needs cows? All those cows wandering around. This is crazy. This is why people wanna work remotely because of all the maids and all their stinking cows.
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Sorry, got a little sidetracked there. The point is, we're going to give you 12 tasks that you can put on your calendar or your to-do list for the year. And by the time things are over, you'll have advanced yourself and your practice and your firm on a whole host of fronts. So let's dive right in. Let's go with January of 2023. Your to-do item for January, 2023 is to review your prospect pipeline. That's the list you keep hopefully a pretty detailed list of all the prospects you have for new clients for this year what services you're going to offer them and how often you've reached out to them. There's an interesting statistic and I've seen a couple of versions of this. It's anywhere from, it takes anywhere from 12 to 16 touches and I'm putting touches in air quotes that you can't see but that's points of interaction with a potential client, right?
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It's them seeing a brochure of yours or getting a mailing from you or getting a call from you or more extensively having a meeting or getting a chance for you to go in to talk to them about what their needs or to look at maybe fill out an RFP or something like that. Those touches vary in intensity and size and complexity over the course of the prospect process, but it's a lot of different interactions with them and you need to keep track of them and have a sense of who's in your pipeline. And here's why. Because you wanna make sure that your pipeline has enough potential new business in it to cover your strategic goal growth goals. Now, I know you have some strategic goal growth goals. Don't tell me if you don't, but let's just assume you do. Let's say it's 10% of revenue.
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You wanna grow your revenue 10% over the course of 2023. You need to make sure that in your pipeline you have enough potential revenue to cover that 10% growth and probably actually a little bit more to account for attrition. However many clients fade away over the course of the year or business that isn't naturally recurring. It was a one-off maybe consulting kind of thing. You need to have some extra. So anywhere from say 15 to 20% of your revenue needs to be in that pipeline in it, do you have enough potential clients in there to make up that amount of money? So we wanna look at your pipeline one to make sure it had that you're going to be able to meet the goals, but also to make sure that it's tracking all the things that should be tracking potential revenue service lines. It'll give you an idea of how much staff you might need, all that sort of thing.
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So January is the month to make sure you've got a prospect pipeline and that it's measuring all the things you need to have in there to make sure that you're going to be able to meet your goals. Alright, let's move on to February. Now, I know tax season is happening, so we try to keep things light in February, March, and April. February is a little less light than the next two. But what you're going to do here is look at all the open positions in your firm, including all the work staff you can't fill for tax season, and see if you can break down those positions into their component parts. What are the tasks? What's the work that each one of those positions is actually doing? And then look at those individual tasks and see what can be done by non-accountants or what can be done by machines, what can be outsourced?
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What can be sent to somebody else? What do you not have to hire an individual person for? And then look at the remaining tasks and see how many of those actually require an individual person and particularly an individual accountant. We all know that there's a problem getting staff into accounting firms. There's particularly a problem getting CPAs cuz there's fewer people taking the exam. There's fewer people studying accounting in college. So we know that this is an important issue. So what you wanna do is look at all these jobs and say, well, is this a job for an accountant or is it really just this 20% of the job that needs an accountant? And can you put those 20% from three different positions together and suddenly you've got 60% of a job that really needs an accountant? Okay, that's only one job that requires an accountant as opposed to three.
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So something to think about as you look at all the positions you have open is to think of them differently from just the position. Don't assume you have to hire someone in that as that's the same as the person who had the role before. Again, maybe you can split those things up and break 'em down and open up your candidate pool for people who, like I said, aren't necessarily accountants. Alright, that brings us to March. Again, we're getting a deeper into tax season. So I wanna keep things pretty simple here. One thing I'm going to recommend you do is read an economic outlook. Now, whatever that may be for an industry you follower where you have a lot of clients or for just the economy as a whole. I'll give you an example of a really good one. RSM u s puts out the real economy on, I think it's a quarterly basis, but it may be more frequent than that, but it's sort of in-depth look at economic conditions and where they're headed with a particular focus on the middle market.
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But you can find economic out outlooks, as I said, for any industry, for the auto industry, for restaurants, for hospitality, for nonprofits, just about anything you can imagine. Go find one and read it and look at those. Look at the things they're warning about, look at the things they're looking ahead to and be prepared to sort of share that with your clients. Reach out to them with some advice that says, Hey, we've heard that the expectations for hotel rooms this summer are pretty light because weather conditions, travel conditions, whatever the case may be. Point being that you're going to get ahead of these broad outlying trends and with a relatively easy lift to reach out, as I said, to find these economic outlooks, these economic forecasts for a particular industry or a particular region. Whatever the case makes sense for you that's just going to be a good thing for you to be able to bring to your clients particularly after taxis.
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And as I said, we kept this in March cuz it's a pretty light, light lift and you'll be able to use it right up until the next time another economic outlooks outlook comes out that you wanna bring to your clients. Alright, that brings us to April. We're already, or already more than a quarter of way through the year here we're going to talk about, because it's tax season, we're going to make this very easy. This is going to be something where it's not something you do, it's something you don't do. And what we want you not to do is tell any for everyone, anyone or everyone how hard tax season used to be or how hard it is now. In fact, don't ever tell anyone how hard anything is or ever was. This is a problem with one of the problems with the pipeline that we mentioned earlier is that accounting has a terrible reputation as a place where you work really, really, really, really hard all the time and never get a break and never see your family and there's no worklife balance.
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And we know that isn't true. We know lots of accountants have families, I'm told. I think they see them from time to time, usually sometime in the mid-summer between April 15th and before they start getting ready for September 15th and October 15th. But do we know that there's some work-life balance out there? So stop making it seem like accounting is the worst possible job. It's not working in the salt mines now. There is a lot of hard work involved, but even that you don't need to talk about. Just don't tell any stories about how terrible things are. It's easy. Don't make your job sound horrible to all the potential people who might come into it. And we're going to come back to this because it's a pretty important point. Accountant accounting is a great profession that offers a lot for people who enter into it. A lot of emotional and financial rewards that are pretty tremendous.
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And so people in the profession need to stop. I need to stop focusing on the downsides cuz it really is. It's driving people away. Alright, next up is May. Now tax season is behind us. Hopefully things are a little cooler, a little calm down. People have had some time off. Maybe you've had a party maybe you've done a post-tax season as sort of after action review how things go. Things are a little lighter hopefully. And what we're going to recommend for this is start a team at your firm. Now the actual thing for a lot of people will be start a sports team, maybe a softball team. If you wanna be a little lighter, you can go for a dodgeball team. A little could be a little more fun. But it doesn't have to be necessarily a sports team. It could be a trivia team, could be a line dancing team.
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Anything where there's a little competition, you can create something for your staff to get together and feels a group that's not necessarily work related. And I'll tell you actually, if you have enough staff you can create more than one team and have them compete internally. The reason for this is not to get competition going or to have people hating each other or that. But one of the great things that creates engagement at firms is shared activities, shared memories, shared moments of intensity, whatever it is. And a team environment is a great opportunity for that and people will feel good about that. They will feel more engaged with their work. It's not necessarily that you're tricking them into getting some kind of team spirit. You're literally developing team spirit by having a team. And it will help with all kinds of things like work-life balance, the perception of work, bike balance.
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It will bring, as we said, bring people together in an atmosphere that isn't strictly related to deadlines and work and give them a chance to appreciate each other as individuals, as people away from work or outside of work. And create some engagement with the firm that isn't related necessarily as we said to work. That's something outside of it, but they still associate it with work. Again, this is not meant to be a manipulative or sort of sneaky way of building this engagement. It's a pretty straightforward way of saying, listen, we don't just care about you as a tax preparer or an auditor or an admin staff. We care about you as a whole person. And there's elements of that that go into that kind of compar competitive team spirit that we wanna reach out to. It's also important to realize that, to look at the sort of culture of your firm and say what kind of team, how competitive do you wanna be?
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Do you wanna be a fierce competition or do you really want it to be sort of lighthearted fun sort of stuff? That's up to you to figure out at your firm and from your people you might ask, maybe do a survey of them. See what kind of things would you be interested in? Look around and see what the options are. If there's a good ax throwing competition in town take a look at that. Unless you've got a particularly aggressive or violent staff, then that may not be for you anyways. Point is try to start a team at your firm, get people engaged in an activity that isn't strictly related to work and you'll find that they develop bonds that will last well beyond the time they work for you and may bring them back at a future date. Alright, we're almost halfway through the year and this is June.
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Hopefully things are a little quieter, you're a little more relaxed you've recovered from taxis and things aren't so crazy. We're going to give you a task for June, which is to meet with eight clients. And you probably wanna pick good ones. Clients that you think have tremendous opportunity for more work or tremendous needs or that are old and good clients that you've worked with a long time and really enjoy and you wanna help them in their success. You're going to meet with eight of them, two a week, two every week for the course of the month just to discuss what's keeping them up at night. No sales talk, no pitches, no specific things about how they're doing in terms of you, what you understand. You wanna know what they understand, you wanna know what they think, what's keeping them up at night, what's worried about them, what are their plans?
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And the goal here is really just, it's a wide range in conversation of hey, what's up? What's going on? Where are you going? What do you need? What's worrying you? And then we're going to go back and you're going to go back to your office and you're going to answer any questions. You're going to look for answers to the questions they have. Don't expect to have answers to the things they're worried about in the meeting. What you're going to do is say, listen, this is really interesting stuff. Some of this I might be able to help you with. We may have some ideas, but I just wanna know where you are so that I can figure out the best ways to serve you and help you get ahead. And then you're going to go back to your office and you're going to look at the conversation, you're going to talk about it with your partners.
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You're going to talk about it with your staff and say, Hey, what can we do here? Is there room? Now in some cases there may not be, but you may be able to find someone else who can help them. Maybe they have a specific issue with a sourcing problem or they have an issue with a staffing problem. These may be things you don't handle, but you may know people who do and who can help them with that. So the issue there is really about deepening that relationship beyond just, Hey, you call me when you have a problem. Or I call you when there's a deadline. You wanna build the end. You wanna know, you wanna build that regular relationship and you want to know what's motivating again, beyond just the problem that they called you about or the deadline that you called them about. Alright, right. So that's June, that's halfway through. So far so good. I hope you're still with us. Let's we're going to move on to July and just a second, but first we're going to take a quick break.
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Alright, and we're back the second half of the year. We've gotten to six months, we're now into the seventh month, July. And the July task is going to seem a little simple for a month where you may not be quite as busy and it's to identify five clients that you'd like to fire. Now, you may have already thought of five clients that you'd like to fire right away. They may be constantly in your mind at all times. But I wanna going to suggest that you put a little rigor behind this selection that you start by identifying who your ideal client is. What kind of people do you wanna work with? What kind of people do you wanna serve? What industries do you wanna work with? What types of businesses are you interested in, excited about, have a lot of expertise in so you can identify the kind of clients that are perfect for you.
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And then also that'll help who's not right for you? And then you can go through your client roster. Now, I don't want you necessarily to fire these people right away. What I really want you to do is focus on figuring out why they're the ones you wanna fire, why they don't fit. Is it personality clashes? Are they not nice to staff or are they really just not profitable or are they not in the space that you really wanna serve? If you're more excited about, say for instance you're growing cannabis business and they're not in that business and have no interest in it, maybe they're not the right fit for you. So again, identify those five clients and really identify what is a good fit for you and a bad fit for you. And that's the task for July. Now the task for August is those clients who identified in August, go ahead fire one of them and then every month after for the rest of the year, I want you to fire one more.
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Now everyone knows that firing clients is hard. It's difficult. Many of them have been with you for years. Even the ones that digital love that aren't a good fit, that maybe the might be the right move to fire them if you need to fire them by raising their fees prohibitively. And if they don't quit, then at least you're getting more money for dealing with them. But the notion here is you really need to call your client roster. We're seeing a lot of firms particularly larger, more proactive and pioneering firms looking at their client roster and saying, who do we really wanna serve? There's too much work to do. We can't do it all. We don't have the staff to do it all. We're getting flooded with all this. We can't support everyone who comes to us, everyone who can sign a check when you're starting out.
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That's an easy trap to fall into and maybe you have to do it for a while, but we're going to suggest that starting in August you fire one at least one a month. If you've got a partner group that may be uncomfortable with that, maybe you have one partner do it fire one of their clients each month to spread the pain around a little bit. Okay, so that's August. And again, a little task for every month for the rest of the year. That brings us to September. I know you have some deadlines going on September, so we don't make this crazy, but we do want to tie it into the return to school. And your task for this month is to speak to a high school class about accounting. It doesn't have to be a class, it could also be a career day, it could be a business club, whatever the case may be.
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Speak to young people about accounting. Usually your state CPA society can help you find an opportunity for this. Or chamber of commerce may be able to help you with history. Just local schools, particularly if they're larger. The question here is what are you going to talk about? And I'm going to go back to tax season, to the April to do and say, don't talk about how hard things are <laugh>. Talk about how much work you do. Don't talk about how many hours you're putting in tax season. In fact, if anybody asks you how hard the work is, say listen, it's getting easier all the time. We have technologies coming in to help us with a lot of the grunt work of it to automate and streamline a lot of our stuff. And where we're really focusing on helping people. And that's a major thing to hit on is the role that accountants play in helping people really just not too strong a way to put it to say that they help people fulfill their dreams, they help them build their businesses, they help them send their kids to college, they help them be able to retire or buy a second home or fund a business, start a new business.
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So these are all things that accountants can do, can really help build more and more. We're going to see accountants helping with environmental, social and governance issues, right? Climate change. A lot of young people are excited about these issues. We're terrified by, don't even wanna put it the other way. And are we excited for an opportunity to be involved in that? Helping? These are all great things to talk about kids. It also doesn't hurt to talk about the money. The profession is extremely lucrative run, right? It's not bad to say, listen, you can help people. You can help them fulfill their dreams. You help the economy work better, you help the capital markets work better, you help everyone do what they want to do better and you make a tiny pile of change while you're doing it. So these are the things you wanna talk about.
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You wanna talk about the difference that accountants can make in people's lives and in the lives of the economy and of the world. And you wanna talk about the fact that it's pretty lucrative. Do not talk about how hard it is <laugh>, in fact downplay how hard it is. You might also downplay the amount of math involved. It's pretty common for people to assume that accounting requires a great deal of math. It doesn't actually, in many ways, yes, it can't hurt. And people who enjoy math often find or are good at math often find that they are. They're a good fit for accounting, but it's not required by any stretch of the imagination. And a lot of the math that used to make it useful to have an interest in math, it's now done, can now be done by computers. So again, you wanna highlight the positive.
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You really wanna go out there and be a great ambassador for accounting and really think about it is selling it. I know accountants don't like to sell, but you wanna sell your profession, you're in it, you love it. Share the things you love about it unless the things you love about it are grueling hours and never seeing your family during tax season, in which case again, refer you to the earlier months task, which is not to talk about anything bad. Alright, that's September. This brings us to October. We know October right is second tax season. You've got the October 15th deadline coming up and I'm going to say that your task for this month is to leave the office at 5:00 PM on October 15th. Seriously, you've known about these returns since April 15th or even April 18th this year. I know the dates a little change, but you've known about these for months and your clients have known about these for months.
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And there's really no excuse at this point for not having had those forms in and having those returns sent out at a reasonable hour. We know that as I said, tax season is now getting spread across the year, but this is the end of it. You've had an extra three or four months since April to get things going to badger your clients. See what you can do about that. And even if you can't try to send as many of your staff home at five o'clock on Friday as you, or Friday, five o'clock on October 15th as you can, if you can send him home on Fridays at five, that's probably a good thing too. But specifically, aim to close up shop at a normal closing hours on October 15th. It's the end of tab, the real end of the year's tax season. And hopefully you've had enough time to plan for that.
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All right, October's gone. We're into the home stretch now we've got to November. With November. I want you to take some time to list five questions that clients routinely ask you. Now, maybe they're the ones that routinely annoy you. Maybe the ones that routinely crop up in the life of a small business or maybe they're just wild and crazy things that happen up in your area or to the businesses that you normally work with. Write those questions down and take a look at them and see what's what they have in common. What do they mean? Why are people routinely asking these questions? Is it regular business stuff? Because in that case, maybe it's a thing you can get ahead of. Don't wait for them to ask you the question. Go out and say, Hey listen, you're in this industry. People in this industry always ask me this question.
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At certain point as they grow beyond this size or as they add a second location or as they work with people outside the United States or whatever it might be for whatever industry you're serving, go to them first. Don't wait for them to come and ask you the question. Go out to them and say, listen, you're probably going to ask me in the next six months. And they may say, whoa, how did you know that? And it's because you read their minds. No, it's because you got ahead of them and you looked at these questions, said, listen, all my other clients asked this. I'm expecting you to ask it. That's a great opportunity to get ahead, to be proactive about what your clients are looking at to impress them with your knowledge and also with the amount of how much you care about them, how deep you want this relation to be this relationship to be.
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There's also other questions that may just come up with this kind of thing where you can prepare in advance to have a boiler plate response. If it's a question about a tax issue that's pretty common and pretty easily explained in an email, have that email ready to go. Have it somewhere on your desk. Have a stupid questions I have received, I probably don't call it that cuz if people see it they might get upset. But have a list of your own sort of personal FAQ that when people ask you that question, you're ready to answer it right away. And you can share it with your staff, your colleagues, your partners, so that they can answer that question, that you have a common answer that you're sharing with everybody. So it's the kind of thing to where what you wanna do is sort of combine all the expertise you have from having worked with so many clients for so long and at such depth that you can predict what the questions they're going to ask and get ahead of them and be consistent and uniform and proactive about it.
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So again, that's the five questions you wanna put together in November. Now we got to December, and I'll tell you what I am. I'm going to find it hard to believe that it's December again already. I don't know where the year went. I'm exhausted. You're probably exhausted too. So what I'm going to ask you to do for December is take some time off. In fact, I'm going to suggest you take the week off between Christmas and New Year, which I should be doing this year. And I want you to give your staff that week off too. In fact, what I really want you to do is close your office entirely. And here's where the real point of this is. I want you to, whenever you have a chance to send people home or say, Hey you don't have to work this week or you don't have to work.
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For many firms, it's half days on Fridays in the summer or full days off and Friday in the summer saying you don't have to work those days. Don't just give them the day off or the time off. Close the office. And the reason I say this is cuz there's, there's three kinds of people out there who make this a problem. There's managers who say, well, yeah, of course everyone in the firm has the day off and if you want to take the day off, that's fine. And they make it clear that they don't really think they're, the people who report to them should be taking that off. Or they make it uncomfortable for people to take that day, that time off. Similarly, there's people, there's staff who will allow bad managers to do that to them who, when the bad manager says, well listen, if that's how you wanna be, they who will know.
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That's not how I wanna be. I wanna be here all the time. I wanna prove my value to the firm. And then there's a third kind of person who will just do that to themselves. Even if they have a good manager who says, yeah, we got the time off. Take that afternoon off or take that Friday off, or take that week off. Make sure you don't do any work. There's people who would do it to themselves who say, wow, you know what? I really wanna make sure that my boss appreciates me and thinks I'm great, so I'm going to work even if I don't need to. Even if they're work to do, I'm going to show up or find a way to make the work happen for all those people. They all need time off. They all need a break. Close the office and that way no one can be forced to work.
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Now you say, well in this age, hybrid, hybrid environments and virtual work, a lot of people are working for home. You can't close the office, there's no physical office to close, or a lot of people aren't working in the physical office. So you do things like don't allow people to schedule meetings in those times. Say, listen, there could be no meetings between Christmas and New Year's, or there could be no meetings on Friday after 10 o'clock or at all. Similarly, you wanna say, there can be no deliverables due. Now obviously you'll say, what about if there's a tax deadline or if there's a regulatory deadline? Obviously you've gotta meet those and that's we're not talking about that. But don't allow, if you have the choice, don't allow managers to say, we'll deliver something on a Friday afternoon and summer. Just don't allow those deadlines to be set.
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And again, don't allow people to set meetings. The trick is you wanna make sure that people do get out of the office. It's a good thing. It's regenerative, it helps with burnout. It makes them feel better. It makes them know, I don't wanna say feel, cause don't. This isn't a manipulator thing. It means they know that you care about them. You wanna make sure that they are healthy, refreshed, they get the work life balance that they need. So that's my final tip for the year is as I say, close the office. Don't get out outta here. Get your staff on. Don't allow them to second guess and make sure that they know you want them. Take that time off, refresh, be with their families, whatever they want to do. And that's it. Those are our 12 tips for the year. I wanna thank you all for listening and I wanna say that we here at a county today, wish all of you happy holidays and happy and healthy New Year.