Why Your Firm Isn’t Done Preparing for the Future

We’ve seen tremendous changes in the accounting industry over the past ten years. We’ve moved from desktop to cloud-based accounting software. We’ve ditched hourly billing and adopted fixed-fee or value pricing. We’ve listened to the experts and have started offering advisory services in addition to compliance work.

Some of us have gone even further. We’ve migrated from the corporate office to home offices. Our face-to-face meetings with clients now happen over Zoom, Hangouts or Teams. We offer our staff flexible work hours and unlimited time off.

If I just described your firm, you might be thinking your firm is already future-proofed.

It isn’t.

Head-Spinning Statistics

All the “future-focusing” we’ve done in our firms has been done through the wrong lens. That’s not to say that the work we’ve done has been meaningless – it’s been instrumental to setting us up for future success – but it is far from done.

What do I mean by the wrong lens? Consider the following:

• By 2025, 75 percent of the workforce will be millennials. The youngest of the generation will be 25, and the oldest will be 45.
• As of 2020, 75 percent of AICPA’s membership was age 65 or older.
• The number of college graduates earning a degree in accounting dropped 4 percent at the onset of the pandemic, but that decline is just part of a trend that started back in 2014.

With a few exceptions, we’ve been solving future challenges in a manner that serves the status quo. (Never mind the fact that we’ve often had to drag the status quo into this future kicking and screaming.) Now, as these statistics show, the status quo is shifting.

Within three years, most of our clients – as well as most of our staff – will be members of a generation that the “old guard” has disregarded as entitled, lazy, and difficult to work with. These young professionals will not stand for cobbled-together, substandard systems, approaches, software, and client experiences. 

In short, what has worked in the past will not work in the future.

Four Strategies to Future-Proof Your Firm

In order to truly future-proof your firm, you need strategies to:

1. Attract new staff.

Take another look at the second and third bullet points. Seventy-five percent of the AICPA’s membership was 65 or older two years ago, and the number of college graduates earning accounting degrees has been falling since 2014. To say you must compete to attract talent from a limited pool is an understatement. Your strategy must go beyond the traditional college job fairs or even the more modern Indeed job postings. Your future-proof strategy should include:

A. Internships, starting at the high school level. If we want to halt the talent bleed-out in our industry, we must get more young people interested in the profession.
 

B. Sponsorships. We’ve all heard that you should hire for personality and train for skill. It’s time to put our money where our mouths are and start sponsoring good culture fits for innovative education and certification opportunities. If you have a tax firm, consider offering sponsorship for EA training and tax-planning certification. Have a bookkeeping firm? Consider offering education opportunities in forward-thinking methodologies and certifications.
 

C. Providing innovative and interesting work. One thing the experts got right 10 years ago was the rise of AI. Compliance isn’t dead – and it never will be – but a lot of the grunt work associated with compliance has been mitigated by bot-assisted technology. This allows you to provide more innovative and interesting work to your team by allowing and encouraging them to take on advisory roles that have not historically been available to new staff.

2. Maximize existing staff.

As you might have guessed – and probably have experienced – the accountant drought means it’s an employee’s market. Your ideal staff member is probably already employed somewhere (which is why you need a strategy to attract new staff), but if they’re employed by you, then you need a strategy to make them want to stay. Your future-proof strategy should include:

A. Tools that help them do their jobs better. According to a Thomson Reuters study, accountants and bookkeepers spend 40 percent of their time collecting documents.

Ho hum.

Your staff doesn’t want to spend 800 hours a year chasing clients and documents. Provide them with the tools that streamline document gathering and client communication and give your entire team full transparency, no matter who is serving the client.
 

B. Deep and meaningful work. Just like you, your staff wants to go deep and help your clients make their businesses successful. The best way to do this is to adopt an industry niche focus. When you focus on an industry niche, you reduce the “noise” that comes from trying to serve clients in multiple industries, and you allow your team to develop the knowledge and skills to provide precise and actionable guidance to your clients.
 

C. A method to learn why staff stay…and why they leave. The exit interview is the worst time to learn that there’s a problem in your firm. You need regular one-to-one meetings with your team to learn what makes them happy as well as what drives them crazy. This isn’t something you can ask once and check off your list…you need to ask why at least five times to get to the true root of what your staff love and hate.

3. Attract clients.

Accounting firms have always needed strategies to attract clients. But now your strategy must attract the millennial demographic. Remember, these young professionals aren’t interested in following the status quo. Your future-proof strategy should include:

A. Top-notch client experience. To attract new clients, your existing clients must be raving fans, and a top-notch client experience creates them. Your millennial clients want a partner that will help them make an impact as well as money, so make sure your client experience puts you in a partnership position with your clients. And don’t underestimate the power of listening…remember, your clients don’t want to be talked down to. They want a partner. Partners listen.
 

B. Innovative approaches. Millennial business owners don’t care that bookkeeping and accounting has been done the same way for nearly a thousand years. They don’t want to hear about “the right way” to do their bookkeeping or that they “should” be reviewing their financials regularly. They don’t even care that much about fancy dashboards that require accounting knowledge to understand. Your innovative approach should demystify your clients’ numbers and give them something they can understand and leverage in an instant. An at-a-glance cash management system like Profit First or a visual representation of accounting like Color Accounting will help you attract these future-focused clients.
 

C. Easy-to-use systems. Your firm’s systems and processes should be client experience focused while still supporting your team. If your onboarding process takes more than a single one-hour meeting, then it’s too complicated. That’s not to say that you should force all clients into a one-size-fits-all solution (more on that in a minute,) but streamline and focus are key to the successful client experience that will attract new clients.

Run this test: Give your systems to your grandma and to a teenager. If they can’t both figure them out quickly and without assistance, they’re too complicated. Go simplify and then try again.

4. Meet your client and staff needs end-to-end.

This is the culmination of the first three points. Your future-proof strategy should include:

A. Technology that supports both your staff and your clients. Most firms are in search of a unicorn all-in-one system that will do everything, but all-in-one solutions are firm-focused. If a client component exists at all, it’s an afterthought, and it shows. Build a technology stack that is efficient but also effective. Bonus: technology like Liscio that is client experience focused will also help your team out in the long run.
 

B. Good boundaries. I write a lot about the importance of setting good boundaries. Most of the time I write from the perspective of the accountant or bookkeeper. But good boundaries are important for your clients’ well-being and for your overall client experience. Don’t be the accountant that shows up at their client’s house at 10pm, in pajamas, tax return in hand. Your future-focused client will not be impressed.
 

C. Fair pricing. The days of bragging about being the cheapest provider are over. Few millennials want the cheapest solution because they understand that higher price equates to higher value. And few employees want to work for the cheapest firm because they know rock-bottom prices equal long hours working for problem clients. Your future-proof firm should price services at a level that expresses the value of working with your firm and that allows you to compensate your team – and yourself – fairly.

It’s Time to Fly

We’ve already done the hard work to move our firms into the future. Switching to the cloud, updating our pricing, and helping our team and our clients adapt to asynchronous and remote work took nearly ten cumbersome years. But those years of effort helped us set our sights on an even greater goal. 

The work we’ve yet to do to future-proof our firms won’t be nearly as hard. This is our chance to embrace our creativity and build the future we want for ourselves, our team, and our clients.

It’s time to fly. We only need to jump.