Are You Changing Your Clients' Lives?

Source: Ric Payne's Blog – Confessions of a Lazy Accountant

In this blog post, Ric Payne tells the story about how he and two work colleagues started an Australian Sheepskin business in 1970, and how a chance meeting with an accountant in a bar changed his life. A simple query — “tell me about your business” — had a dramatic impact on the company's growth and ultimately inspired Payne to study accounting. A few simple ideas written on the back of a drink coaster helped Payne and his partners grow from annualized revenues of around $21,000 to nearly $1 million in revenue in their first full year.

The full story is too long to reproduce here, but it's worth reading. Payne says he learned several important lessons from this experience (excerpt reproduced with permission):

1. Everything good and bad starts with a conversation.
2. Listen and not only might you learn something but you will develop trust with the other person. Once you have that you can become an agent of change.
3. A pen and the back of a drink coaster or envelop is all the technology you really need to change people's lives, which is why we created concept models to help accountants engage in concept model grass-roots conversation.
4. Accountants have the ability and positioning to make a huge difference to the lives of people.
5. Visiting with your clients is what really shows how interested you are in them and their business.
6. People outside a business (in other words, you) are far more likely to come up with ideas on how to improve it than the people in the business, especially the owners. And I would add to that, I found I came up with a lot more ideas when I was at a client's business than I ever did at my desk. The reason for this is what I call environmental immersion, which is akin to experience we have had with our Mastermind Alliance — the collective wisdom of a group of people talking, thinking about, and focusing on an issue is far more powerful than a person thinking alone.
7. Perhaps the biggest lesson of all: This is not rocket science — conversing about the ways to grow a business, large or small, is a no-brainer framework for a robust conversation. So with that in mind go back to bullet point 1.

For the complete post, read “A Question and A Conversation That Changed My Life.”

From Ric Payne's Blog – Confessions of a Lazy Accountant, http://theconsultingaccountant.com, December 16, 2010.