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This is a strange topic to bring up during tax season, but it is as good a time as any to take stock of your practice and your long-term goals. This is a two and a half-minute read and hopefully you will read it a couple of times, and then will dedicate some serious thinking about it after tax season when you are more relaxed.
Reason 1: You do not want to grow. This is a personal decision and, if that is your decision, then there is nothing wrong with it and you shouldn’t obsess over it. Do what is necessary to maintain your practice as it is now so it will continue that way as long as you want to keep working.
Reason 2: You do not delegate delegable decisions. That means you are not using leverage to pass on every task that can be done by someone else. You tend to want to make every decision. In many cases it is important for you to make the decision, but it cannot be so in every case. Delegate more. Part of growing is for your staff to also grow. That growth comes when they are empowered to take charge, supervise and make decisions. I can pretty much guarantee that some of those decisions will be wrong, so do not delegate decisions that could put a client, or you, out of business. Everything short of that can be handled when a wrong decision is made. That is part of growing. Think of a baby learning to walk and the many times they fall until they finally do not fall. What is that smile worth?
Reason 3: You run your firm as if it were a CPA practice and not a business. You are in a business that happens to perform professional accounting services. You are first a business owner and manager and second, a CPA. If you could not succeed in your own practice, you would still find work as a CPA, but it would just be in someone else’s practice. Being in business means you have the ultimate responsibility for everything that happens in your business. This also means you need to control it, oversee the quality, handle the hiring, perform the marketing, manage your customers, and get regular financial reports and daily key performance indicators to help you manage better. You also need to strategize and plan the growth. A hint on how to perform your ownership functions is to do what you would tell yourself to do if you were your client. Work, manage and lead as an owner.
Reason 4: Evaluate everything you do with a long-term view. You are not in business to get tax returns out the door, but to provide professional services to people who rely on you and pay you for that. Short-term fixes do not provide long-term benefits, processes, procedures and duplicable practices in repetitive functions. I know many accountants who start every year and every tax season where they left off last year. That is not growth and not working off of a sustainable business model. Serious reflection should be made over every part of your practice. You can identify most of the important issues and then pick the more serious ones, or the most serious, and start with those. Spending time trying to improve, streamline or fix the most serious issue confronting your growth ain’t such a bad idea.
Reason 5: Insufficient cash flow. Continuously being short of cash thwarts clear thinking about growth or anything not directly related to getting the cash to pay the payroll and other bills. The cash flow needs to be worked out. I recently wrote a
This is a good short list with some takeaways that could be implemented pretty quickly. There are many other reasons and things you could do, but any of the above is a good start.
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