With tax season entering its last stretch, it can be hard for accountants to think beyond the next few weeks — but then, it's often hard to think beyond the near term, isn't it? Getting through the next week, the next month, the next project and the next deadline occupy so much of our attention that we give short shrift to the long term, focusing on the present at the expense of the future.
There's a famous saying that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second-best time is right now. It's an interesting proverb because there's really two things going on there. The first is the clear suggestion to stop putting things off and start working on the future now. This tax season is the second-best time to start thinking about next tax season — making careful note of the things that are going wrong this time around, for instance, to fix them before 2025 — but it's also the second-best time to start planning for the tax season of 2030. That might mean building a long-term relationship with an outsourcing company — or even starting your own outsourcing business. Better still, it might mean setting annual goals for weeding out basic 1040 returns from your client base, so that in 2030 you're spending less time on the usual flood of boring, low-value returns, and are able to focus on a smaller number of more interesting, more profitable ones.
That long-term idea points to the second — and much less discussed — point of the proverb, which is to start thinking in decades. Trees can take 20 years to reach full growth; so can accounting firms. Establishing yourself as experts in a field or in a market is the work of years, even in this fast-paced world. Similarly, it can take a decade to get a firm ready for a transition — building the bench strength and service offerings and culture that make it attractive, then finding the next-generation partners or acquirers or investors who want to take it on, and then managing the actual handover, which can take three to five years.
And while you can get through tax season and most of your other day-to-day work relying on muscle memory and the occasional revamp to accommodate regulatory changes and technological advancements, those long-term initiatives can't begin without a long-term vision, and right now is the second-best time to start imagining what you want your career or your practice or your firm to look like in a decade or two, and then begin plotting out your course to achieving that.
We all know what a full-grown tree looks like, after all, and what kind of seed to plant to get a maple or an oak or a pine. What kind of seed you should plant to have the firm or career you want is entirely up to you — but the time to choose is now.
