Ric Payne's Blog: The Consulting Accountant
Better Business. Better Life
Because industry structure plays a major part in determining the way in which competition plays out in an industry it’s useful to take a look at how structure changes over time due to forces coming from outside the industry (e.g. regulatory changes, technology impacts) as well as shifts in the way firms within the industry respond to those forces, innovate and compete. Continue reading “Structural Change in the US CPA Industry – Small Firm Challenges”
“Explain how I can attract and retain better quality clients” was one of the responses from 92% of the people who attended a webinar I presented last year in which I asked the following question: what are the top 3 questions you’d like me to answer in the book I’m writing on practice development? Continue reading “So you want better clients”
I’ve been reading a biography on the Wright Brothers that describes in minute detail the hugely difficult process they went through to create an airplane. One of the side notes that caught my attention was a reference Continue reading “The theater of service has been around for a long time”
When I was writing my earlier post on financial literacy I was going to comment of the payday loan industry and the obscene interest rates (which can easily exceed 1,000%) they charge people who are short of cash and have to live from Continue reading “Good on you Google!”
How much better our society would be if everyone did what is right. I choose not to watch the news much because it’s so depressing but I made an exception last night and, as predicted, it was depressing. So much so that I feel compelled to share Continue reading “Financial literacy raises its head again”
They–the nameless and faceless people who make predictions about everything from the weather to the stock market–say it costs 6 times more to acquire a customer than it does to retain an existing customer. Interestingly, the literature contains references to acquisition to retention cost ratios ranging from 3:1 to 30:1. Quite frankly, I don’t know if the 6:1 metric is an urban myth or a thoroughly researched observation but I do believe Continue reading “The Why and the How to Measure Customer Lifetime Value”
Yesterday I had a conversation with one of our clients who asked: “how can I get better clients?” He believed the problem he had was a marketing challenge. Continue reading “How you can get better clients”
Not so long ago I received an email from a guy who used to work for me in which he said “my resume looks good but I haven’t really found my sweet spot in the past couple of years …. you realize at 40 that the likelihood of changing industries or starting a game elsewhere is pretty unlikely so I’ll stick with the accounting industry for the next couple of years for bread-and-butter income and see where to go from there.”
I wrote a fairly lengthy response to his email that I believe would be of interest to anyone who Continue reading “The most productive years of your life”
I recently finished reading Geoffrey Blainey’s A Very Short History of the World – all 450 pages of it! As interesting as it was, I’m so glad it was the short version. I came away from that book with a renewed appreciation of human accomplishment but that’s not want I want to talk about. Of the many things that resonated, one was Continue reading “Let’s do something”
Studies of business survival over many years reveal a disturbing fact: five out of ten businesses do not survive more than five years and as few as 3 out of those that do survive the first five years live to Continue reading “Why Most Small Businesses Fail or Only Achieve Modest Success”