Author: Ric Payne

I was talking with a member the other day and she promised to send me a document by the end of the week. A short time later she said “you’ll have it by am Saturday.” I said, “is Saturday the end of your week?” to which she replied, “it is during tax season!”

Rick Telberg, who writes a great newsletter for the AICPA, reports in the February 4, 2008 edition that 98% of CPAs he surveyed report some level of stress and a very significant 57% admitted to being frequently stressed or at crisis point. The US may have a worse “busy season” than most other countries but accountants I talk to around the world tell me that they are working harder and feel a lot more stressed than they have in the past.

More than 90% of CPAs work more than 50 hours a week during busy season and a staggering 30% are working more than 70 hours. Equally importantly, 58% are working more than 50 hours over the full year! During tax season, a 6–day week is the norm for most firms. If nothing else this gives meaning to the phrase “…for goodness sake get a life.” It also explains why young talented people are looking for a better way to earn a living than a career in public practice.

For the past several years the top challenge faced by accounting firms has been the attraction and retention of talent. Various reasons are commonly advanced for this including: the buoyant economy (until recently anyway), more legislation-driven compliance e.g. SOX, a shortage of graduates (that is now changing) and I’ve even seen time sheets being blamed for the high attrition rate.

This situation seems to be accepted as the “given” and the solution I see most often has been to try to change the environment. For example, let’s bring in pizza, have fun breaks, close at noon on Friday’s after busy season is over.

But it’s not an environmental problem. I firmly believe the problem is that leaders of firms that are suffering have lost sight of their own and their firm’s purpose. Is that purpose to create value for clients and capture a reasonable share of that value for the firm? Or is it to be all things to all people and to provide a service that is as cheap and fast as possible to as many clients as can be accommodated?

Ron Baker, of the Verasage Institute, says “bad clients drive out good ones” — he considers it to be so important he refers to it as Baker’s Law. I agree with him and think we should add an extension to define Baker’s Law 2.0 as “bad clients drive out good clients and good team members and in the process, drive down the capacity of the firm to create value for its clients, its team members and its owners.”

There is one over-riding characteristics of a good client and that is someone who is willing and able to benefit from the work you do. If the client is too small (or too large for that matter) to really benefit from a professional relationship with you then you’ll be unable to create much value and therefore you’ll be unable to capture much value. Your effort, in other words will be wasted.

I would also add a few other criteria that I consider to be important. Is the client pleasant to deal with (life is too short to put up with arrogance and rudeness)? Does the client have a positive disposition (beliefs become outcomes)? Is the client organized and willing to do his/her part to ensure that a mutually beneficial relationship exists (this includes being willing to work with the delegates)? Is the client growth-orientated (when your clients grow you grow)? Is the client in an industry that has a bright future (you can help turn a client around, you can’t generally do much to save an industry)? Is the client receptive to your advice and assistance (for advice to have value it must be acted upon)?

You’ll notice I haven’t said anything about the client’s value as a referral source or his/her promptness in paying your bill. My reason is these outcomes generally follow when you have clients who meet the criteria I have described. Delighted clients are those who recognize the value you have created, they are therefore willing and able to pay you, they are also willing to refer you (to like minded people) because they’re confident that you will not let them down.

I believe poor client selection (and retention) is the root cause of work-related stress, mediocre financial performance and the inability to attract and retain talented people (which in turn leads to stress and under-performance.) Sadly, most firms have way too many “poor” clients. These are not necessarily bad people but they are consuming the firm’s resources that could be much better deployed.

Tom Vermeulen, a member of the Principa Alliance who has a practice in Ripon, California, was diagnosed with a terminal condition several years ago. Fortunately, the diagnosis was subsequently found to be incorrect but it caused him to re-think what he was doing with his personal and professional life. After he recovered from this traumatic experience he attended a Boot Camp and proceeded to implement change in his firm.

Tom truly understands the meaning of the phrase “I choose to work with clients who will benefit from the work I can do.” In fact in the past year, he has been engaged by 20 clients to provide monthly or quarterly monitoring as part of a Management Control Plan. His total fee from this group of clients exceeds $100,000 but not only that, he’s enjoying the time he spends with them and both he and they know he’s making a difference. I should also add that he is amongst the top 5% of income earners for firms of his size (11–12 team members) in California.

I believe there is no excuse for being stressed in busy season. Purge yourself of work that is low value and use the time that would otherwise be invested with those clients in a much more productive way. That might even involve taking some time off to reflect on what you want your business to do for you and to do so while remembering that if you continue to do what you have done in the past you will continue to get the same results. The stress will not get less.

Nelson is a city of about 45,000 people located on the northern edge of the south island of New Zealand (by the way… if you haven’t been to Nelson it needs to be in your list of 100 places to visit before…)

Nelson’s socio-economic profile virtually maps the rest of New Zealand and for that matter, most of the communities in which our clients practice. It is neither extraordinarily wealthy nor is it extraordinarily poor. It’s a perfectly ‘typical’ community.

And as is typical of communities like Nelson, it hosts many different types of businesses, the vast majority of which are small owner operated entities.

One of our clients, Bowley Consulting, operates in Nelson and has a success story that’s worth talking about.

The team at Bowley Consulting has generated additional annualized fees of $115,000 from implementing a Business DashBoard program from 11 clients with 6 more ready to start. The target for 2008 will be to have 25 clients being enrolled in the DashBoard program.

That represents a run rate of $180,000 per year not counting additional work that will inevitably come from the regular contact.

We recently received an email from Cathie Bowley who is not a qualified accountant and who in the past has had limited involvement in the business. In her own words, she said “Bowley Consulting is booming and DashBoard has really taken off. I am really enjoying this new understanding I have of the business and Business Development etc – as you know I was only on the periphery a few years ago…”

Bob Bowley leads the management team at Bowley Consulting and has always strived to create value for his clients with first class service that goes beyond traditional compliance. But even he is astounded by how receptive business people are to looking at their business through the lens of a graphical DashBoard.

IT’S WITHIN YOUR REACH

The nice thing about implementing the Business DashBoard system is that it’s a logical extension of what accountants traditionally do and as a result it’s familiar non-threatening territory. Not only that, because it is such a different and simple way to represent the “numbers” of a business your clients understand it and value it. Bingo! Winning combination.

To be able to instantly identify what’s happening in a business on a monthly basis and determine what needs to be done to achieve pre-determined targets is incredibly valuable. That feeling of “control” is what business owners crave.

I’m often told that business people tolerate such bad financial record-keeping that any attempt by us to “analyze” the numbers is a waste of time. This is a sad reflection on our ability to show clients the value of understanding the numbers but to be fair to ourselves, it’s a hard row to hoe when all we’ve had to work with are boring reports called Balance Sheets and P&L’s.

How much easier it is to get a client excited in a living, working management tool than in a couple of pages containing columns of numbers. The DashBoard system is a financial management tool. It is not a report. When business people see it they also see the value in the discipline of maintaining quality accounts.

Just as importantly, when business people work with an advisor using the DashBoard it is impossible for them not to also see the value created by their business advisor in getting them to think about their business at another level.

Opportunities for further coaching or analytical work (e.g. analysis of customer profitability) are inevitable.

These are the services that really do have a big bottom line impact and which get talked about by delighted clients. They are also the services that give us a great sense of professional accomplishment in the knowledge that we are in fact making a difference.

So what’s stopping you from following the lead given to us by Bowley Consulting today. Get your entire team involved (accounting and non-accounting staff alike) and plan on another $100k – $200k in DashBoard services in the coming year?

It’s a highly achievable challenge. It can be done. It IS being done. You don’t need qualified accountants to make it happen, you just need to make it happen.

and one more thing… don’t forget to check out the natural beauty of Nelson, New Zealand, you will receive a warm welcome if you visit…. Like the team at Bowley Consulting, it’s memorable.

I was talking with one of our members recently and she mentioned that her firm’s marketing strategy has been to focus very much on building a strong relationship with its clients. She went on to say that rather than seeking new clients her marketing concentrated more on looking for ways to increase revenue from her existing clients, for example by offering insurance services, mortgage and general finance broking and personal financial planning. She felt that picking up new clients is a logical consequence of referrals from existing clients who are delighted with the relationship they have with their service provider.

I couldn’t agree more.

Delighted clients are the major source of profitable firm growth not only because they are the source of quality referrals but also because they are the people who are most likely to be receptive to additional services and are much less likely to be price sensitive or “service shoppers”.

Delighted clients are the sole source of “good” profit as opposed to “bad” profit. At another time I’ll talk more about the good versus bad dichotomy because I know there are many people who wrongly, in my view, believe any profit is good. For now, let’s just accept that “bad” profits are profits made at a customer’s expense.

But … and here’s the big but! Not all your clients fall into the “delighted” category and you might be surprised to discover that the majority don’t.

Having a good relationship with a client is a lot more than having a client on your books who you have a “good rapport” with. People need accountants. We know that. We also know that once someone starts working with an accounting firm there are switching costs that can be quite significant. That is, it is both inconvenient and costly to jump from one accounting firm to another.

It follows from this that although a firm may not see much client turnover it is dangerous to assume its client base is delighted with the service and is very loyal. In fact, if your firm is like most firms, more than 50% of your clients feel a sense of being trapped (because of their perceived switching costs) that ranges from very strong to weak.

Not only that, if you are a “typical” firm then at best only 10-15% of your clients are likely to refer you to a friend or associate and it’s highly likely that at least 5-10% are detractors who, if asked, will actually dissuade their friends or associated from dealing with you. The remaining 75-85% are ambivalent.

If you are in any doubt about this stop and think about it for a second. If 15% of your clients were referring just 1 client each to you (and the fee they paid was equal to the average fee paid by your clients) then your revenue would be growing at 15% a year. Your fees would double every 5 years! If you’re not growing at that rate year-on-year then one or a combination of factors must be at work: (1) you are losing clients, (2) your prices are dropping, (3) your average fee is falling and/or (4) you are getting much less referrals than you might think.

In recent years it has become very common for accounting firms to partner with financial service providers. These partnerships offer terrific synergistic opportunities for both parties and both have done extraordinarily well in the buoyant economic conditions that have prevailed in recent years.

However, to a very significant extent, marketing of professional services is being driven by financial services partners and is focused on transactional opportunities such as “here’s an opportunity to switch to a lower interest mortgage”, or “we can get a great leasing deal for you” or “now’s the time for us to review your retirement plans and investment strategy” or “let us refer you to a lawyer who can review your will” etc. etc.

There is no doubt that buyers of these services have received value in the economic climate we’ve experienced in the past decade but I wonder whether the marketing process that seems to have become commonplace augers well for developing good solid long term relationships with clients.

I’m often told it is easy to make money from services like insurance, lending, tax-effective investments and traditional investment planning – also rather cutely called wealth management. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this because it’s obvious that people need these services (I specifically exclude tax minimization schemes because the tax authorities around the world are systematically attacking their architects and vendors). But when it’s described as “easy money” I think we have some cause for concern.

Customers are not stupid. They can sense when a firm is driven by self interest rather than their interest. Simple little things like a phone call to see how things are going or better still, a site visit, speak volumes to clients about how their service provider views the importance of a relationship. No less important is responding to phone calls or emails within a reasonable time. I’m astounded at how poor some service providers are at this simple courtesy.

Fred Reichheld, a Director of Bain Consulting and at one time a member of the Harvard Business School Faculty has spent a good part of his life researching the importance of loyalty on business performance and sustainable long term growth. His principal published work is called The Loyalty Effect and more recently, he published The Ultimate Question. Both of these books are required reading in my view.

He suggests that there is only one metric that is important to business value growth and that’s what he calls a Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is calculated by asking customers to rate, on a scale of 0 to10, “How likely is it that you would recommend <<the name of your business>> to a friend or colleague?”. People who select 9 or 10 are classified as promoters Those who score in the range 0 to 6 are classified as detractors. The NPS is simply the difference between the percentage of promoters and the percentage of detractors.

Reichheld provides some very impressive empirical research to support his proposition that businesses with a high NPS are superior performers in their industry. The path to long run sustainable growth, he suggests, is closely tied to doing what needs to be done to increase the number of promoters and decrease the number of detractors. Sounds simple and conceptually it is. The hard part is putting some practical initiatives in place that lead your clients to feeling positive about the relationship you have with them.

With that in mind, professional service firms especially must make their clients feel that they care and that they (clients) are not being “sold” solutions that are obviously profitable for the service provider with little regard for the client’s benefit.

This is what forming a professional relationship is all about. It’s not purely a transactional relationship. When people feel that you are focused totally on their wellbeing and you deliver consistently then you will have a Net Promoter Score that is high and positive. If your NPS is low or negative you have some work to do. Perhaps this is something you should be measuring.

I’ve been in Paris for the last couple of weeks taking some time out to think and reflect on our illustrious profession.

There’s a place not far from our apartment called the Place de la Concorde. It’s where 2,780 people lost their head to Dr Guillotine’s invention during the revolution of 1790’s.

Visiting this place reminded me of a thought expressed by Seth Godin in his book “Small is the New Big” when he suggested that in life and in business people typically fear advocating a product or process innovation because it’s accompanied by a risk of failure.

For this reason, he suggests, people will naturally tend towards the low-risk status quo. The status quo doesn’t have to be defended and because people are, by nature, optimists who believe the present will continue forever it is a safer refuge than advocating an edgy innovation no matter how important it may be to the future success and perhaps survival of the business.

Godin likens this to a preference for the rack over the guillotine. “… almost no one worries about the rack. We don’t quake in our boots about a layoff that’s going to happen in two years from now if we don’t migrate our systems before our competition does. We’re not afraid of stagnating and dying slowly. No, we’re more afraid of sudden death, even though the guillotine is probably a far better way to die.”

This might appear to be somewhat gruesome dialog but I think Godin is absolutely right. I believe one of the reasons so many organizations do not achieve greatness is because their people are intent on walking in step with the status quo. They will do this even when they feel in their bones that change is necessary if not to survive then definitely to get ahead of the pack.

Greatness is achieved when people think AND ACT outside the box. The status quo never lasts. Change is inevitable and firms that do something—anything—different are always the ones that end up leading the pack.

What’s really interesting about this is that it tends to be smaller firms that are the most innovative and who at the end of the day grab a lead in the “growth stakes” but then they get bigger and what got them there gets lost.

There’s a time honored principle that’s alive and well in the accounting profession which every client I talk to is well aware of, yet so many practitioners fail to act on.

Not all clients bring the same value to the table.

This is well understood by top performing firms. However, most firms are willing to accept any new client who walks through the door without giving consideration to whether a profitable relationship is likely to be created. It’s more like…”If you have a pulse? We’ll work with you”!

A North American study found that in the financial services sector, 20% of clients contribute on average 225% of a firm’s profit and the remaining 80% consume 125% of profit.

I’m not suggesting that this applies to your firm but I know from our involvement with thousands of firms that the cost of servicing the bottom 80% of clients is between 25% and 50% higher per hour than the top 20%.

I also know that the quality of referrals from the bottom 80% of clients is nowhere near as good as it is from the top 20% and yet for many firms, most new growth comes from acquiring low level clients.

The key to client selection is to identify and nurture clients on behalf of whom you can add most value. They have the greatest potential to grow as a direct consequence of working with your firm. These firms are fiercely loyal and become strong advocates.

Boot Campers and Principa firms around the world have been using Principa’s 11 point Client Selection Criteria for the past decade. Among other things, it recommends assessing the potential client on the basis of the number of years they’ve been in business, their willingness to listen to advice, the competitive landscape in their industry, their personality, their profit improvement potential, the degree of sophistication of (or lack thereof) their management processes and planning systems are important considerations when selecting clients.

It gives me a great kick to hear about the long-term effects on practice growth and the quality of life our members are enjoying as a result of applying the Client Selection Criteria. Like the email I received from Mike Amspacher (Vancouver, Washington) a little while back. In it he describes how the bulk of his referral work now comes from his ‘A’ class clients and new clients are coming to him specifically because of the value added services he offers.

In a similar vein I received a note from Tony Wolf, a Canadian practitioner, who told me that after 3 years of diligently implementing our client selection strategies he and his team are making more money than ever before, they’re loving their work again, they barely work overtime and have a fantastic group of clients.

And Peter Cox, a UK practitioner, has strict client selection criteria including a mandate that the minimum fee is £2,500 (about $US5,000). Guess what’s happened to his profitability since he implement these policies. More to the point, guess what’s happened to the quality of his clients and the quality of work he can now do for them because they are not totally focused on getting the cheapest job done.

The kings of client selection are my good friends Paul O’Byrne and Paul Kennedy who have an enormously successful practice in Goffs Oak, London, UK. They down-sized their client numbers from 550 to about 50 and super-sized their minimum fee from £1,000 to £10,000. Needless to say life is a lot better for them, their team and the clients they now work with.

To discover how they did it and how you can too, you’ll want to participate in the workshop they are leading at our Annual Conference in Vegas this October.

If you want your firm to shine you must have a shining client base.

Andy Grove of Intel once said “There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to dramatically change to rise to the next performance level. Miss that moment and you start to decline.”

I wonder how many opportunities to achieve great things are lost because of the “missed moment”. I suspect it explains why so many practices grow rapidly to a point and then seem to stagnate and/or decline.

It also explains why some new kids on the block seem to be able to put firms together that have a refreshing feel about them and represent a viable alternative to the established organizations. These firms experience rapid growth and often race past the established firms with respect to profitability, the ability to hire and retain talent and the quality of new business they attract. These firms represent the new order.

But once the new order has become established, complacency sneaks in, a fear of losing market share emerges, innovative energy subsides and “the moment” is missed. The firm settles comfortably into the role of being an accounting business like all the others and gets more or less the same results as all of the others.

And those results are not always great. In fact they are scary.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics Accounting Practices Survey (2001-02) notes on page 4 “Despite a growth in the activity of accounting practices, profitability declined since 1995-96, decreasing 0.6 percentage points from 19.4%. Profitability continued to decline since 1992-93 when the operating profit (before dividends and drawings) was recorded at 20.5%”

Taken over the longer term it looks even worse than that. For smaller practices with less than 10 partners, here are some disturbing trends.

This graph shows accounting firms have been able to generate more fees (in CPI adjusted value) over the past 30 years. Technology has obviously played a role in that. Interestingly smaller practices have seen the highest productivity gains as shown below.

And as you’d expect this has enabled less people to do more work so the number of team members per partner has fallen.

So far so good. With labor costs rising all the time we might reasonably expect the productivity gains from technology to be reflected in a bigger bottom line. WRONG!

When Net Profit per Partner for 1971 is expressed in 2002 dollars we discover that it has actually fallen. What’s gone wrong?

Obviously this does not apply to all firms. I know lot’s of firms that are doing fantastically well. But I think the profession as a whole is suffering from a malaise.

Why is this happening?

My thoughts on this are as follows:

Technology has flattened firm structure so that higher level people are able to do lower level work, not because they should but because they can. Because clients are vocal in their concern with fees, some firms have been experiencing horrendous write-offs (in the range of 30-40% in some cases and typically in the 10-18% range).

Clients have become less loyal, more mobile and much more vocal about fees especially in the face of increased compliance requirements mandated by the government. Additional compliance costs are the necessary evils of business and the work is not viewed as being valuable. This has served to keep charge rates down and/or write-offs up.

The use of timesheets as the exclusive basis for billing is likely result in downward fee pressure for several reasons:

· To the extent that technology-driven productivity improvements leads to improved faster throughput because of better workflow management or higher first pass yield, the savings are passed on to the client in the form of lower real costs when timesheets are used for billing.

· Work that is considered low value by clients is assigned the same hourly rate (when done by the same person) as work that would otherwise be seen as being higher value but it is always the lower value work that sets the perception of overall value received.

· A reward structure that gives a strong emphasis on time causes higher value people to hoard lower value work which has a huge opportunity cost because although they are “busy”, they are neither seeking nor doing higher value work. Once again this negatively impacts clients’ perception of value and keeps charge rates down.

I believe inter-firm comparison and best practice benchmarking studies contribute to industry complacency and a migration towards mediocrity. Simply put, human-kind has a heard mentality. We tend to feel comfortable going with the flow and as long as we’re performing more or less at the same level as others around us we’re content with life.

At the risk of appearing to contradict myself, I do not believe that these studies are useless. In fact I find them very useful to identify potential and in particular to remind under-performing firms that there is room for improvement. But I also believe they can stifle innovation by encouraging under-performing firms to mimic the strategies and operations of the best performers and while this might help the under-performers lift their game it manifests a me-too industry that has very little product or process innovation.

Finally, the barriers to entry for this profession are low while the barriers to exit are high. This is one of the main reasons for the industry being so highly fragmented and explains why prices are below what they would be with a higher degree of consolidation. A discussion of this is best held over for another day because it addresses the whole issue of industry economics and structure. Suffice it to say that the price floor in highly fragmented industries such as the accounting services sector tend to hover at a level just high enough to keep the marginal service provider in the industry and this serves to pull all prices down.

The consequence of this is that the consumer of the services of accounting firms has been the consistent beneficiary. However, those firms that choose not to play by the “industry rules” and instead offer innovative (true value added) services, innovative pricing systems, innovative delivery models and innovative organizational structures can and are doing extremely well. These are the firms that are ready and willing to move when the “moment” arrives.