What’s the ‘Happiness Factor’ of Your Business?

Gearing up for Fall? Now is the perfect time to sit back, take a deep breath, and re-evaluate your tax business and how it’s performing for you.

CPE Link instructor Dominique Molina points out, “They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” and adds that a critical reassessment of the health of your tax business is just the apple you need for good financial health.

Molina points out just a few of the key questions practitioners should ask themselves:
• Do you know the value of a client?
• Do you have a dashboard to stay in touch with your business from anywhere?
• Have you created an individual, tailor-made business model?

Molina, co-founder and president of the American Institute of Certified Tax Coaches and an author and frequent lecturer, also urges practitioners to look below the surface at the “happiness factor” of their business.

That factor, she says, is made up of a range of variables that include “relationships, meaningful and important work, progress toward goals, and connecting to something larger than yourself.”

In the more nuts and bolts area of running a successful and satisfying business, Molina says practitioners should consider whether they “offer real value” and also whether the values of their customers have changed over time.

She urges practitioners to be more eclectic, broaden their scope and offer an array of services so that they serve varying needs of their clients.

And she says that to keep your financial house in order, make sure you always have a clear view of which of your services and products are the most popular.

 

Leveraging Facebook, Twitter for Professional Growth

If your experience with Facebook is limited to viewing pictures of your co-worker’s cats and snooping into your son’s party plans, you’re missing out on a major professional tool.

So says CPE Link instructor Garrett Wasny, a web productivity consultant who advises financial professionals on Internet discovery and social media.

“With so much of our professional and personal lives spent online,” Wasny says, “this knowledge is beyond relevant. It is the absolute core of how we gather information, make decisions and live our lives in today’s digital age.”

In fact, Wasny says, a thorough understanding of social media such as Facebook and micro-blogging site Twitter can be used to build your practice, network and career.

Facebook counts more than half the U.S. population among its users, and Wasny says there’s a lot to consider: How to register and control privacy, how accounting organizations use its services across the globe, and how to leverage its tools to boost online productivity, workflow, communication and collaboration.

Twitter is a free micro-blogging service that allows users to send and receive “tweets” — text-based posts of up to 140 characters. Those tweets can seem like the height of self-involvement (@kittykat Im goin to make that soup u talked about #whatieatfordinner).

However, Wasny points out that since its rollout in 2006, Twitter “has been embraced by everyone from Senator John McCain to Britney Spears and grabbed headlines all over the world.”

But with financial professionals “already overwhelmed with e-mails, overloaded with websites, and swamped with Facebook friends, do they really need one more Internet service in their professional and personal lives?” Wasny says the service can be used for business research, network building, marketing, recruitment, reputation management, idea sharing, regulation monitoring and much more.

Turns out social media isn’t just about how much beer your kid drank last night and what kittykat is having for dinner.

 

Save Trees, Time With Digital Best Practices

Considering the massive amounts of data businesses generate minute by minute – not to mention the urgency to go “green” for the sake of an increasingly fragile planet – the idea of “less paper” technologies become very attractive.

CPE Link instructor Roman Kepczyk says the digital realm provides practical ways to decrease an administrative department’s paper pile while upping its efficiency and security.

For example, most firms have adopted digital paystub delivery, but may be more hesitant to switch from integrating expense reimbursement with payroll. However, by doing so a firm can not only cut down on the paper it uses, but also cut down on bank transaction fees – a double win. And time can be saved that was formerly used schlepping back and forth to the bank by using remote check scan for deposits.

Kepczyk also suggests having personnel enter all expenses each day into Practice Management when they enter their time, rather than using separate Excel-based expense reports.

In teaching firms digital best practices, Kepczyk points to an “explosion of data and information” that can be handled by a corresponding expansion of connection options. Therefore, he stresses, system access and resiliency are an absolute must, as is reliable security.

Consider having firm owners log into a secure portal to read financial reports, rather than distributing them as PDFs or in paper format. One benefit to this practice, Kepczyk says, is that the digital controls triggered will leave an audit trial that shows exactly who viewed what, when.

And as a general rule, he says, everyone who works out of the office at least once per day and does not have home remote access to firm applications should have a a laptop as their only machine. He points to a study that shows 35 percent of firms utilize laptops for owners/managers as their only machine.

Kepczyk, who is director of consulting for Xcentric, works with accounting firms to hone their internal production processes. It’s a tough economy, he points out, and the time is right to focus on “improving your firm’s production processes and educating your personnel on best practices for this turnaround.”

 

Manage Change To Your Advantage

Like it or not, the economic slump is driving major changes in accounting firms. Firms are:

• Merging or acquiring—or preparing for it
• Rehiring with a new focus after having pared down
• Investing in new technology that changes how the firm works and interacts with clients
• Accelerating new business development

“Change is not just a buzz word, it is a necessity to understand how to use it to your advantage in today’s economic climate,” says CPE Link instructor, Sandra Wiley, COO, Boomer Consulting, who consults and teaches about managing organizational change.

“It isn’t enough to make a change,” adds Wiley. “Change must be managed carefully to minimize resistance and optimize adoption.”

Firms making significant changes need to understand that people resist change for many reasons:

• They perceive changing as riskier than doing nothing
• They feel loyalty to people associated with the old way
• They have no models for the new way
• They fear they lack competence in the new way
• They feel overwhelmed
• They fear that reformers have hidden agendas
• They feel that the change threatens their identity
• They fear a loss of status
• They fear a loss of quality of life
• They are skeptical and want proof that the new way is sound
• They genuinely believe the change is bad idea

Then firms need practical strategies for managing the change that is already taking place.

What’s the most challenging change facing you and your firm today? How are you managing it?

 

Cure for the Dreaded Performance Appraisal

Don’t you just hate performance appraisals? Too often–

• They discourage teamwork and collaboration
• They’re inconsistent
• They don’t address communication issues
• They are one-directional
• Feedback is too subjective
• They produce negative emotions

Those are some common knocks on performance reviews. Whether you’re getting them or giving them, they can be painful experiences, right? Well, they don’t have to be if there is a quality performance management system in place, says Sandra Wiley, COO of Boomer Consulting, who teaches seminars on performance management and managing change in organizations.

What makes a quality performance management system? For one thing, says CPE Link instructor Wiley, “Individual goals should link to the firm’s broad, strategic objectives. A quality appraisal system will not only drive staff members to a higher level of commitment and achievement but will ultimately drive the firm to superior results.”

What is your beef with performance appraisals? What do you think would make them better experiences for all concerned?

 

A Brave New World with Social Media

In a previous post, Garrett Wasny listed ways in which accounting and finance professionals are using Twitter to good advantage. Because his specialty is professional development consulting for accountants, we followed up and asked him how social media has changed the way he conducts his own business. Here is Garrett’s very interesting list—contrasting the old days (before social media) with the new ways (after social media).

Says Garrett:
“I use social media to—

Improve my marketing:
Old: static business cards
New: dynamic LinkedIn profile

Boost my professional development:
Old: magazines subscriptions
New: RSS feeds

Enhance communications with customers and colleagues:
Old: zero access to top decision-makers
New: now, directly connect and eavesdrop using Twitter

Accelerate workflow and productivity:
Old: Travel
New: Virtual meetings and webinars

Help me recruit:
Old: newspaper ads
New: LinkedIn candidate search

Find new gigs and jobs:
Old: public library research
New: follow companies on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.

Make me a smarter shopper and cut costs:
Old: hard copy catalogs
New: Red Laser app on mobile phone

Create new business models and revenue streams:
Old: only banks loaned money
New: peer-to-peer lending marketplaces provide lending and borrowing opportunities

Improve Google ranking:
Old: launch website and hope users find me
New: Every mention of my name on social media raises profile and boosts search results”

How are you using social media in your firm?

 

Twitter: What is it good for?

What is Twitter good for?
a) Helping people organize a grassroots revolution against a dictator?
b) Giving public figures enough rope to hang their reputations?
c) Promoting a teen idol’s latest album?
d) Absolutely nothing if you’re a CPA?

If you’re thinking “all of the above,” you might want to reconsider, at least about (d).
According to WeFollow, a directory of Twitter Users, there are 681 users who list Accounting as their interest. These include industry media, such as AICPA News (with 7,267 followers) and AccountingWEB (with 4,168 followers).

Some state CPA associations are on Twitter—the Alabama Society of CPAs has more than 1,200 followers. You might expect educators and consultants to use Twitter, and they do. Michelle Golden, for example, who teaches CPAs and others about social media, has more than 3,000 followers.

Some individual practitioners are using Twitter, as well. If you’d like to see who they are and how they are doing, you can look up “Accounting” on WeFollow. CPE Link is on Twitter, too.

How are accountants and accounting organizations using Twitter? “They are using Twitter for business research, network building, marketing, recruitment, reputation management, idea sharing, regulation monitoring and much more,” says Garrett Wasny, an award-winning speaker, professional development consultant, author, columnist, and former management consultant for Price Waterhouse in Vancouver, Canada.

Twitter might be worth another look. Tweet tweet.