Accountants

You spend much of your working life helping clients to improve their businesses. Who helps you to work on yours?

About You

• You and your people are technically excellent
• You are ‘Business Advisors’ because gone are the days of being old-fashioned ‘bean counters’
• You have a strong belief that you and your firm are different from other firms

But

Having technical expertise isn’t enough anymore, if it ever was, because clients take your technical expertise as a given.
You have implemented all the systems you advise clients on but there’s something missing, you are not achieving the results you know you could and should be achieving.

• Cross-sell ratio isn’t what it should be
• Recovery rates are poor
• Managers aren’t managing
• Business development is hit and miss

The bottom line being…. could be better!

If you are different from other firms, what makes you different, in the eyes of the people that matter, your clients?

Here’s a test on differentiation

1) Have a look at the websites of your closest competitors or get some of their marketing material

• Now …… substitute their name and logo on your stuff and put your name and logo on theirs
• What content do you now have to amend or delete, on either their stuff or yours, because it now isn’t true?
• If the answer is “not very much” …… what makes you different?

2) When you or your people are talking to a potential client, what are you saying about you, that your closest competitors couldn’t say about themselves?

• Simply saying you are different isn’t enough – because your competitors are all saying it too!
• Trust me, this is true, I am a potential client and I am on the receiving end of it – as are all your other potential clients.

All this is really frustrating for you because you are different. Get in touch, we can help you figure out what the difference is and how to communicate it effectively.

This model may help to explain what’s going on with business under-achievement.

Technical or Task vs People (Internal or External)

What this model is designed to show is that most accountants have a ‘technical’ or a ‘task’ mind-set. It goes with the territory. Without it you probably wouldn’t be an accountant. And it serves you well early in your career when being technically proficient is how you demonstrate value.

However, over time this changes. As you progress through team leader, manager, account manager and so on, it’s the People side of things that become more and more important:

Internally: how you lead, manage, motivate, develop and sometimes have difficult conversations with the people and talent you are responsible for
Externally: how you initiate, develop and maintain relationships with clients and intermediaries

By the time you reach Partner level the balance has, or should have, changed totally to ‘Small T’ and ‘Big P’

Most professional people understand this from an intellectual perspective but…

How much time and resource has been invested into making you a technically good accountant?
How much time and resource has been invested into making you a good leader, good manager or good client relationship manager?