Best Practices of Great Firms
Source: CPA Trendlines
The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from an article by Marc Rosenberg. It lists 25 best practices extracted from Rosenberg's work with great firms over a 20-year period.
- Proactive business-getting efforts; lots of team selling.
- Exploit potential with existing clients; increase our firm's “touch points.”
- Develop the power of niche marketing and specialization.
- Provide world-class service.
- Be a higher-priced-lower-volume shop rather than a lower-priced-higher-volume shop.
- Develop effective management structure and leadership.
- Franchise procedures; implement basic work processes done the same way by all partners.
- Institutionalize clients; sell and service as a team; penalize solos.
- Partners focus on serving clients and nurturing staff, staying out of administration.
- Survey clients and staff to find out what they think of you.
- Maximize staff to partner leverage; partners are delegators, not doers.
- Have a clear strategic plan. Vision. Direction. Implementation. Performance discipline.
- Have the right people ON the bus and wrong people OFF the bus; common focus and culture.
- Provide diversity of services.
- Develop a tenacious commitment to making your firm a great place to work.
- Partners are good bosses who cause staff to stay and get promoted to leadership.
- Provide proactive leadership development programs.
- Provide world-class training.
- Plan for succession, client account transition — for the old and the young.
- Promote good partner relations; address conflicts.
- Maintain partner accountability and good corporate citizenship; “if you're a jerk, you're out.”
- Have targets for all partners and staff, but partners shouldn't be clones of one another.
- Base compensation on performance: partner comp = strategic planning + achieving goals.
- Put technology to work for you.
- Benchmark, both for MAP statistics and for client-oriented performance.
For the complete article, read “25 Ways to Turn Good Firms into Great Firms.”
From CPA Trendlines, April 4, 2016, cpatrendlines.com.