I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the guest and host kept using the term "promiscuity." At first I was taken aback until I realized they were talking about being intellectually promiscuous — not falling so in love with an idea that you're unwilling to change for the better.
The mindset is that great managers and leaders are always willing to change the way they think and run their businesses. Instead of staying married to the same old ideas and processes, maybe it's time for us in this profession to become more intellectually promiscuous.
Before we go any further, let's clear the air: I've been happily married for almost 20 years. With a happy marriage, you are 100% committed, and you've "burned the boats" on self-doubt. Businesses are different. Technology changes, client expectations change, and your ideas should be changing too.
As accountants, we're constantly feeling time pressure. Too often we don't give ourselves enough time to work on our businesses because we're so busy working in our businesses. Steven Covey would say, "We're so busy sawing that we don't have time to sharpen the saw."
When getting work out the door is the top (and only) priority for your firm every day, you don't have the luxury of looking for ways to get the work done faster, more efficiently and less stressfully. As a result, you get married to the same few ideas about how to run a firm, what it means to be a CPA and how to treat clients. It's hard to get better and grow when you have such a narrow mindset. Ultimately it leads to declining revenue and staff turnover.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), change is here to stay. You can't keep saying: "We're going to 'white knuckle' our way through this thing until all this change is done." That's not going to work. Being
Al Davis, maverick former owner of the Oakland/Las Vegas Raiders liked to say, "I'd rather be right than be consistent." Davis never stopped pushing the boundaries of how an NFL owner should behave. Sure, Davis made plenty of enemies, but he never stopped looking for ways to give his team an edge in the cutthroat world of professional football.
As accounting firm leaders, competitive threats are all around us. Those threats used to be limited to rival accounting firms. Now, every aspect of your business is being encroached on by other industries that want in your clients' pockets.
As the old saying goes: "What got you here won't get you there." The way you ran your business five or 10 years ago won't keep working today; it's certainly not going to work in the future. You need to keep evolving if you want to stay in the game.
Client expectations. Client communications. Client response time. All those things have changed dramatically and will continue to change dramatically in the years ahead. Clients now expect it to be as easy to do business with their CPA as it is to do business with Amazon, Netflix and Uber. Take client portals, which weren't even a term 10 years ago.
Even five years ago, having a client portal meant that you sent clients a link to a shared file where they could upload documents. That may have seemed cutting-edge then, but today you can't say you have a client portal unless it offers real-time communication, CRM, data gathering and workflow tools. That's how quickly things have changed. Clients want more real-time access to their information and their accountant with less friction and more efficiency. That's never going to change.
When portals first emerged, many firm leaders downplayed them. They told themselves clients would never use them or trust them. That's just being foolishly faithful to the idea that clients really enjoyed gathering up their documents and receipts, making photocopies and schlepping down to your office, paying for parking and dropping off their bundle so they could sit around for weeks waiting for you to call them with the results of their return. Why? Because that's the way it has always been done. Ouch!
Great ideas from outside the industry (and from those in the trenches)
Part of being intellectually promiscuous is recognizing that many good ideas impacting our profession are coming from outside the accounting industry. Take private equity and other sources of capital coming into our world. These players are aggressive. They're bringing ideas that work successfully outside of professional services and implementing them in the accounting world.
The more attached you get to certain notions about how things should be done, the harder it gets to keep up, much less evolve. That's because you've associated yourself and your personal brand with those legacy ideas. But if you can stay emotionally detached from your firm's processes and ideas and simply tell your team, "I don't care who's right. I only care that we get it right," then you're on the right track. But not every firm leader has the courage to make that leap. Also, the best ideas about how to interface with clients, how to get them onboarded and how to run more efficiently, are going to come from your client service associates — the folks in the trenches — not from the partners. If you're still defending ideas because they're yours, or because they weren't invented by your firm or by top management, then you may not be on the right path for the future.
When it comes to a lifelong relationship, marriage is a great thing. When it comes to ideas, be more promiscuous. Try new things, get comfortable being uncomfortable. Your firm will be better for it. How are you upgrading your processes and ideas? I'd
