Many who attended AICPA & CIMA ENGAGE 2023 last week hoped to head home from Las Vegas armed with a list of actions to strengthen their public accounting firms.
A couple of leaders in the space had a decidedly different idea for practitioners attending their ENGAGE session.
"There are all these great ideas and things that we want to start doing, but we want to really explore the idea of what we need to stop doing," said Carrie Steffen, a founding shareholder and president of The Whetstone Group. "Unlearning is a deliberate process of looking at what no longer serves us."
Steffen and Keila Hill-Trawick, CPA, founder and CEO of Little Fish Accounting, shared five things that firms should stop doing — kicking off with a real head-turner.
Stop putting clients first
"It sounds counterintuitive, right?" Hill-Trawick said. "Because a lot of what we're talking about these days is about client experience and making sure that your clients are taken care of. But accountants are notorious for burning themselves out for the sake of a client."
Instead, Steffen said, firms should put their team first — for the benefit of everyone involved.
"We built our firms on doing whatever it was that our clients wanted, when they wanted it. We certainly put them in the driver's seat, gave them all that power and control in the relationship," Steffen said. "Like any unhealthy relationship, when there's an imbalance of power, something's going to give. We are now at that place in the profession where it's starting to give. We have to reset our expectations."
Steffen asked by a show of hands how many attendees were facing talent acquistion issues. The majority raised their hand, to the surprise of neither Steffen nor Hill-Trawick.
"If you keep losing your people and you can't replace them, you can't serve the clients well anyway," Hill-Trawick said. "Taking care of your team does take care of your clients."
Stop making revenue the primary objective
Of course, firms are in the business of making money, but making decisions that don't focus on the money can prove lucrative.
"When we only focus on the top line — when we're only focused on 'X' amount above last year — we tend to make decisions that don't support the foundation of the firm," Hill-Trawick said. "And revenue costs. We make these decisions to make more money, and then we have to get more things in order to make that revenue. To some extent, that feels arbitrary.
"There are firms that want to hit their first seven figures or multiples of seven figures. But if at the end of that, you're going to have the same profit that you had last year, is that the decision that you want to make?"
Steffen said her firm launched in 2000 with a focus on revenue but turned over a new leaf around 2010. The deemphasis on revenue actually spurred growth.
"We started making not-so-great decisions on the basis of what we thought success looked like," Steffen said. "We made the conscious decision probably too long into our business cycle — maybe 10 years — that this is not the type of firm that we want. The culture isn't right. People are turning over faster than we want. The clients that we're serving really aren't the best fit. We're not feeling very fulfilled.
"We stepped back and said, 'You know what, let's keep revenue out of the equation. Let's just focus on the vision for the firm.' What problems do you want to solve every day? How do [you] want to spend your time? How do you want to bring our people together?
"When we stopped focusing on revenue and started focusing on the culture, people, vision, services, delivery — all of those things — we actually grew exponentially faster than we did when revenue was the top objective."
Stop overemphasizing best practices
"Because traditional accounting firms have worked in a certain way for so long, it's easy to just say, 'If I pick up from them, I should be a successful firm,'" Hill-Trawick said. "But starting today looks a lot different than starting 20 years ago."
Hill-Trawick and Steffen challenged firm leaders to consider flipping "If you can't beat them, join them" on its head.
If you join them, you can't beat them.
"I'm not saying don't look at some of those things that have worked because they've worked for a reason, and you want to adopt those. But I think sometimes as a profession we overemphasize the best practices thing," Steffen said. "Sometimes I think it's helpful and useful and necessary to look outside of what your profession is doing to find those elements that we can incorporate.
"Your clients theoretically don't have that much experience with your competitors. … The client experience they're comparing you to is Amazon or their physician's office, or, in some cases, their pizza delivery system. We need to start looking outside of the traditional."
Stop creating silos in your business
"We think that we're protecting our team by saying, 'You don't need to be in this meeting. This doesn't have anything to do with you. This is just for this part of the team,'" Hill-Trawick said. "But we miss opportunities."
Steffen recounted a story of three people laying bricks. The first one said he was laying bricks to make a wage to feed his family. The second said they were building a wall, and the third said they were building a cathedral.
"It's all about taking what you're doing as a team and reframing it with a bigger purpose, so that we're all contributing," Steffen said. "Do you want to cultivate a bunch of bricklayers who are working for a wage, or do you want to cultivate someone who understands their role in building a cathedral?
"As leaders, that's what we need to be thinking about every day in terms of breaking down the silos."
Stop thinking in terms of expenses
"As accountants, we want to keep everything low," Hill-Trawick said. "We want to keep everything from salaries to software expenses low, but there are cons to that. You keep your salaries low? People are going to leave or not be as good as you need them to be. If you keep your software as low as possible, you are manually doing things that could be automated for you.
"The common thread … through all of what we're talking about is intentionality and this idea that you are stopping to say, 'Is this what I want to do? Is this how I want to spend my time?' Expenses are a big part of that."
— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Bryan Strickland at Bryan.Strickland@aicpa-cima.com.
