What’s in store for the typical practitioner in 2006?

Welcome to the New Year.

As we start another year, and another busy season approaches, I wanted to get you thinking about your practice, your clients, and, indeed, your life.

Are you living the life you thought you would be by now or are you, like most, still some ways away from where you had intended to be?

Are you still struggling with certain clients who you:

· Don’t enjoy dealing with?
· Don’t recover an acceptable fee for your time and effort?
· Don’t get paid within a reasonable time frame?

If so, what have you done about it recently?

Public Accounting can provide us with a truly remarkable life.

No, that isn’t a misprint, and for the avoidance of doubt I’ll say it again: Public Accounting can provide us with a truly remarkable life.

There is no other profession in which we can:

· Help a client start up a business
· Help a client to raise the necessary cash to finance growth
· Guide a client through the maze of mergers and acquisitions, and
· Help a client to become a millionaire (or better) when they choose to exit their business

I cannot think of another line of work where we can become the ‘trusted advisor’ to so many different businesses in so many different circumstances, AND make a really good living doing it. Variety is truly the spice of public accounting life!

Yet we sometimes act as if the weight of the world rests on our shoulders. In my days in public accounting I used to love the buzz I got when I had helped a client secure additional funding from their Bank. It gave me an incredible sense of satisfaction.

To see a truly grateful client express their deepest gratitude when I had helped them resolve a potentially big tax problem again made it all worthwhile for me.

There are countless people that I have encountered over the years that became very dear friends to me. There are also countless occasions, mostly involving clients, that I will remember for as long as I live.

Many of our clients become friends, and some of our friends become clients. Because of this we often feel a ridiculous sense of loyalty to certain clients who have not qualified for such devotion from us and, frankly, never will.

The client who is abusive to our staff, the client who moans and groans about our fees, the clients who we almost have to take to court to get paid for providing a darned good service to, these people tend to act like emotional vampires – they suck the will to live right out of us.

And for many a practitioner, these are the people they think of first when we mention ‘the office’ to them.

But guess what? We are not stuck with these clients. We have free will. We can tell them to go forth and find a new accountant.

One of the causes of many a complaint by both client and accountant is the $39.99 tax return offered by H & R Block. Thank God for them. I firmly believe that H & R Block is one of the finest things to happen to our profession in recent years, because we now have somewhere to send our ‘D’ type clients!

Trust me, especially in the present marketplace, if you let go of some of your most troublesome clients, you will soon fill the time they drained out of your business (yes I did say business, not practice – we are running a business, it just happens to be that your business is public accounting) with much better quality, more profitable, and even more enjoyable work. Enjoyable work - what a concept!

We will never hit a target that we cannot see, likewise, we will never achieve a goal we haven’t set.

So, my dear reader, my question to you as we set out on a new year together is simply this: What goals have you set for your business and, indeed, your life for 2006?

Before you get too busy, please take some time away from the office, close the doors, unplug the phones, switch off cell phones and blackberries and sit and quietly think.

What would you change about your life as it is today? If you were starting over, what would you do differently? What types of clients would you target and which would you not act for? What fee levels would you ideally charge and how do they compare to what you’re really charging?

One question I find useful to ask is simply this: As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? (I’ll almost certainly bet it was not to be an accountant, was it.) Then ask, what was it about that career/job/role that appealed to me as a kid, and how can I capture some of the fun of that job in my role today in public accounting?

Many practitioners are simply frustrated.
They’re frustrated that nobody told them being in public accounting was going to feel like this. They’re frustrated at the volume of additional work required to conduct an audit today compared to ten years ago, for a comparatively similar fee. Ditto for some review work. They’re frustrated that if they are the auditor for a small family business they are now prevented from providing a range of additional services that only a few years ago were the backbone of the practice for some.

Many place the blame for many of these frustrations squarely at the feet of their professional body, particularly the smaller firms, and they’re frustrated by so many other changes that have happened to our profession over the last ten years or so, that they often cannot see the wood for all of those tress in the way!

And they’re frustrated at not knowing where to start to get help and assistance to break free of the shackles holding them down and preventing them from enjoying a remarkable life as a practitioner.

Great practices do not evolve by accident - they evolve by design. How are you designing the future of your firm? Is it growing by design or by chance? The results these two different types of firm deliver are remarkably different, and it is up to you to decide which firm you are operating. Sometimes change is necessary and unavoidable.

Finally ask yourself this: what am I prepared to do to make a change?

However small a change you might decide on, if it is a change for the better I can almost guarantee that this time next year you might be feeling a little better about yourself, your firm, your career and your life.

Let’s not get bogged down with the negatives this year. Every practitioner should be making a new year’s resolution that they are going to make some changes, however small, in order to start running their practices, instead of their practices running them.

Good luck!