Define Your Partnership Criteria

Source: AICPA CPA Insider

The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from an article by Jennifer Wilson.

Leadership teams must provide young leaders with a set of guidelines for what constitutes partner-level performance.

When defining your firm's partner candidate criteria, consider including these seven elements:

1. Leadership behavior. Define your must-have behaviors for being considered to sit at the partner table and look for up-and-comers who display these behaviors.
2. Client service skills. What do you expect in terms of client service, relationship development, and management, as well as the example the individual sets for others?
3. Technical abilities. Technical ability can be measured by a person's mastery of a specialty service or industry niche, capacity for assimilating new standards and changes, and ability to navigate complex client needs. If a partner has the ability to develop people, then technical abilities should be a less important factor.
4. Financial performance. By the time an up-and-comer is ready for partner consideration, he or she should be independently managing engagements and, ideally, complete client relationships.
5. Administrative abilities. Firms don't tend to see the basic administrative abilities of time entry, billing and collecting, and responding to email and voice mail as “partnerly.” But partners who haven't mastered these basics can cause real problems.
6. People development skills. If you can invest in your people and build up their abilities, client service and revenue production will take care of themselves. Be sure to at least replace all people developers with people developers to ensure that you do not take a step backward in this important area.
7. Business development skills. Your partner group will need to honestly assess your firm's succession profile and identify how many “true” business developers you'll need to replace and when.

For the complete article, read “Do you have what it takes to become a partner?”

From AICPA CPA Insider, July 30, 2012, http://www.CPA2biz.com.