I’m straight up a man of faith. I’m going to lay that out there and tell you right now that God has been hard at work in my life – all my life. Personally, I could write an entire book about all of the miracles my family and I have experienced as well as all of the people and opportunities that were placed gently in my path at the exact right time and that would lead me to business and spiritual growth. Now, as we are trying to manage through a global pandemic that has touched almost every human in some way, I’m wondering if this is also a revelation for the accounting profession.
A revelation is defined as “a surprising or previously unknown fact that one is made aware of in a dramatic way” (thanks, Google). And I believe that is exactly what is staring our profession in the face right now—a blunt, much needed revelation that is forcing us to wake up and finally embrace the opportunity that is so much broader than traditional compliance services.
I’m working on my second eBook where I’ll go into more detail, but consider this:
We’ve been talking about the shift from compliance to advisory services for years now, but some of us have been taking our sweet time.
We are accountants who love analyzing numbers, but hate change. Change is disruptive, time-consuming and unpredictable! Since time is our currency and disruption is non-billable, change is carefully scrutinized and often over-analyzed, but one thing is for sure—it’s inevitable!
Thought leaders and publications have been telling us to productize our services, learn how to market to new niches, implement productive tech stacks, build our brands, fine tune every detail of our clients’ experience, and harvest data to share with clients. The larger firms and the more progressive small- and mid-sized firms have been ahead of this curve; building advisory revenue to rival that of their compliance revenue. However, there are tens of thousands of CPA firms still out there that continue to run their business status quo. They are avoiding ideas like adopting processes that promote automation, enhancing protocols that will help refocus valuable time on more profitable services, and even going digital.
The problem is that we’ve had a massive disruption!
How we serve and collaborate with clients literally changed overnight.
In a flash, we had to close our offices to the public and allow employees to work from home. How many of you were ready for that? Many firms were not prepared or technologically configured to be able to physically leave the office and move everyone home. So, we continued to come into the office in many cases. We are a critical industry and our work load evolved (and maybe even doubled) overnight. With bins in our lobbies or outside of our offices for clients who still insisted on dropping off documents, we quickly realized that the exchange of paper documents has to be minimized. For us at Roberts Accounting, most of our clients use our portal, but we still have a decent amount that insist on meeting in person or dropping off documents (at least more than I would like). If Grandma and Grandpa can get on Facebook, we can teach them how to use a portal (I tell clients it’s no different than logging in to your bank account). There will be very few exceptions next year.
However, collaborating with our clients has to be more and better than just an exchange of documents through an electronic portal. The portal naturally takes away the “human connection” that clients get from face-to-face interaction. It lacks the human touch component which makes it all the easier for these clients to disassociate. That is why we need to ensure that we protect the relationship we established and maintain contact with these portal clients. Whether it’s providing valuable insight and advice during the delivery of their tax return (I discuss this more in a previous blog post), engaging them in tax-planning meetings post-tax season, offering other financial services that demonstrate that you care about them or just taking them to lunch once a year! Either way, we have to proactively bring other value to their tables now that we’ve taken away their chance to get that personalized face time at the drop off stage.
We also learned to really appreciate the value of video technology. Seriously, did you know how easy it is to use Zoom? Or Teams? I’m using it on a weekly basis and am looking to have Zoom be the foundation to the virtual accounting practice I want to develop! Just last week, I collaborated with a client that moved out of the state over Zoom. It was easy, it felt like an in person meeting, and we both loved the convenience!
The new legislation that came as a direct result of COVID-19 is “revelationary”!
The calls started coming in on March 26th. “Pat, what does this mean – am I eligible for this new PPP loan and if so, where do I go to apply?” “Pat, I had to close the business due to COVID, but I don’t know what options I have to get through all of this. Can you help me?” “Pat, the bank can’t tell me how much I can request when applying for this PPP loan—can you let me know what I should request?”
Most of my staff and I were already working from home and it was like a flood of chaos just hit all at once! Our firm became so inundated with these requests and concerns. We became a triage unit (if you will) because we had to re-prioritize all of our work and prioritize the work based on (quite frankly) “life or death.”
Helping our small business clients apply for loans and providing them the advice they needed in order to get through this trying time became the priority. Unfortunately, we had to put tax returns aside while all of this was going on. As we were in the thick of this though, I was struck by a revelation. This might be the biggest opportunity our profession has seen since the computer! Once these businesses (and even individuals) get back on their feet, they will need a professional they can trust. A business advisor to help them apply for the PPP loan forgiveness, to assess whether they should take advantage of the NOLs carryback, take an early distribution from their 401(k) penalty-free, invest in the stock market, refinance their house (this is a big one!), re-develop their budget for 2020, manage cash flow, develop a disaster relief protocol and work-from-home policy (something that most of us never had before COVID).
In my firm, we have started to develop a consulting service that is aimed at addressing each of these needs specifically—because they are not going away for awhile! I’ll be talking more about this in my next eBook that will be released soon. The goal is to serve. Not to sell. To serve. My friends and fellow accountants, you need a sales strategy now more than ever to position this incredible opportunity to serve the small businesses in your communities.
At the end of the day, ask yourself…
COVID-19 accelerated the transformation of consulting and advisory services in the accounting profession. It truly is a revelation and it’s staring us in the face.
The question is – what are YOU going to do with it? Stand by passively, only reacting to what’s going on around you? Or, are you going to be proactive and adapt so that you can serve your clients better and grow the revenue for your firm in the process?
To your success,
Pat
