Ric Payne's Blog

There was a time when I was young, opinionated and stupid that I thought people who invested their time, energy, intellect, and taxpayers’ money studying ants, termites, fungi, and fossils were nuts. I’m now starting to understand that we can learn a lot from animals and organisms that have occupied our planet very successfully with practically no change in their basic nature for hundreds of millions of years. Here’s why.

Exactly 23 years ago I presented a program in Reno Nevada at the Peppermill Casino to 593 people who were members of the Results Accountant’s Network in North America. This was followed with the same program in Sydney and Stratford-upon-Avon in the UK. In total 1,176 people attended. It was called Results Revisited and it drew together every idea we had shared with past delegates to the Accountants’ Boot Camp on how to add business development advisory services to their service arsenal.

In a recently published book (sept 2020), When More is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency, Roger Martin argues that a short term focus on maximizing shareholder returns contributes is the cause of economic inequality and instability. A second, more comprehensive, work on the causes, extent, and consequences of wealth and income inequality is Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Inequality is contributing to geopolitical instability that we’re seeing around the world. There is good cause for concern.

When you’re working with clients as an adviser they’ll often ask you what seems to be a simple question like “what do you think my marketing budget should be?

The basic purpose for developing and implementing a competitive strategy is to achieve superior economic performance in creating and delivering value to your selected customers. The most common way to monitor financial performance is by means of the return on invested capital but, in saying that, other non-financial outcomes are important as well.

Stephen Covey tells us in his brilliant book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that we should seek first to understand and then me understood. That is so critically important to influencing people it hardly bears close examination.

I read a lot of books and the ones I enjoy most are usually biographical. This one by Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, is amongst the best I have read on leadership not because, during his 14 years as CEO, $184 billion was added to shareholder value but because of the way he led the business – his philosophy of leadership.The book is full of sage advice (in fact he added 45 “lessons to lead by” at the end of the book.

At a time when many accounting firms are planning to get into the so-called business advisory space it’s important to think about the type of personal characteristics that are most suited to success as an advisor because the characteristics that are exhibited by great compliance people are not necessarily those that suit business advisory. Here are my thoughts.

For background on the case the client was a  £350,000 light engineering partnership paying annual accounting fees of around £800.  We’ll let the business development manager in the firm take over the story…