In a few weeks you will be starting tax season, which will be the busiest time of the year for most accounting firms. Many firms undergo a tax season retrospective afterward. These are valuable and, for those that are diligent about it, some meaningful changes result so the next year's tax season will be better. I suggest you conduct a retrospective now.
Tax season is part of your practice, but not everything about it. While tax season work will push aside some regular work, most regular services will still need to continue. Doing the retrospective now, while it is still calm, will give you an opportunity to reflect on your priorities, what is important to your practice and its future, and how certain essential things that you might deem necessary for your growth will be overlooked or deferred because of the unwieldy deadlines, workload compression, longer hours and immediate demands of tax season.
Everyone reading this column is reading it as a businessperson and not as an accountant. Accountants read tax and audit updates and similar material to make their service techniques better. Businesspeople read about making their businesses better. Practice or business? You need to decide what your primary concern is. Businesspeople want to get greater revenues, train, retain and grow staff, provide better services to customers, and charge the appropriate fees for what they do. Professionals running an accounting practice want to be more knowledgeable about what they do for their clients, take care of clients' immediate concerns and get work in and out as quickly and efficiently as possible — quickly being more important than efficiently. A practice is run for the immediacy of its activities. A business is managed for its long term and to grow its asset value.
My view is that once you hang up your shingle, you must consider yourself a businessperson first and an accountant second. The other way around simply means you switched the job you had for one where you work for yourself; still with a job, but perhaps with a much nicer boss. If you do not succeed, you will still be an accountant but not as your own boss or as a businessperson. That means you must not fail in being a businessperson because there is no fallback. Being an accountant has the fallback of a job somewhere else.
I am not suggesting shortcutting or sacrificing client service, but growth in revenues and long-term value is attained by strengthening your business, and needs special, important and deliberate attention. Do not get diverted by the pressures of tax season.
There is a great deal of convergence of the two activities. Getting better technically is equally important for the accountant and businessperson, as are proper client service and staff training. However, developing a new service or strengthening a niche you are involved in, initiating a new marketing program, emphasizing the necessity of following firm processes and systems, and taking a timeout to teach a staff person the importance of error-free work might not seem as necessary when you are trying to get three or four tax returns sent to clients, but these are essential for the growth and sustainability of your practice. How you choose determines if you are in a practice or business.
Use today's tax season retrospective to provide the perspective necessary to strengthen your business. Put what's most important first and set your sights on that.
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