Independent CPAs -- Tips for Success

Source: CPA Trendlines

Following are excerpts from a July 12, 2010, blog post, reproduced with permission, by Rick Telberg.

The most successful sole practitioners or small firms:

1. Create personal brands by building individual market renown. They create notoriety for themselves through publishing, speaking, and networking, and by focusing on a core specialty.
2. Regularly develop and disseminate intellectual capital. Often, there are just a handful of partners in large professional firms who create all of the intellectual capital, and everyone else feeds off of it.
3. Focus on conversations, not on PowerPoint. While it is always a good idea to outline your thoughts in writing, creating so many PowerPoint presentations takes a huge amount of time and energy. The best independents lower their threshold for a client meeting. They talk often to their clients, and they have learned how to hold an engaging conversation.
4. Try to achieve success, not perfection. When you lack resources, you have to focus on delivering a solution that is good enough and works — not on the one that is most comprehensive and elegant.
5. Have learned to eliminate non-value-added activities. Every single activity has to contribute directly to the project's goals and deliver value to the client.
6. Take responsibility for their personal development. Without mandatory training seminars or meetings, independents must really think about the skills they want to develop.
7. Organize around clients. Large firms must reconcile geography, practice groups, industry sectors, and functional expertise within the same organization structure. Independents are always organized around one simple and essential dimension: the client.
8. Truly act like it's their money. For independents, every cent they spend on expenses is a cent that doesn't go into their pockets (after taxes, of course). It's a good mindset and a good discipline.

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From CPA Trendlines, http://cpatrendlines.com, July 12, 2010, “Eight Ways the Smallest Accounting Firms Compete and Win.”