Defining and Developing Your Firm of the Future
In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace, it’s important to take a close look at your firm to determine where you are and where you’re going. By doing so, you can improve your operations, differentiate yourself from competitors, and set yourself up for scale.
Here are some tips to help you define and develop your firm of the future.
Revisit Your Value Proposition
A value proposition is a statement that clearly outlines the value your firm will provide to clients. It should convince someone to choose you over other providers. Take a close look at your value proposition and make sure it meets these guidelines:
- Specific: What specific benefits will a client receive if they partner with you?
- Pain-Focused: How will your services fix a client’s issues or make their life easier?
- Exclusive: How well does your value proposition show off your competitive advantage and differentiate your firm from competitors?
Hone in on Your Core Competencies
Your core competencies are your firm’s unique capabilities, knowledge, and skills that give it a strong competitive advantage. Since they’ll guide your reputation, marketing strategy, and growth, be sure to outline exactly what they are. While your core competencies depend on your unique business model and resources, they might revolve around innovation, strong partnerships, excellent customer service, reliability and/or consistency.
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Understand Your Limitations
It can be a real challenge to enhance and grow your firm if you don’t know your limitations. By defining them, you’ll be able to ensure your short-term and long-term goals are realistic and attainable. You may also find solutions to limitations that deter you from reaching your full potential. Some of these may include a shortage of employees, lack of technology, and inadequate knowledge about certain topics. Be honest with yourself during this step.
Establish a Referral Network
A referral network is made up of businesses and professionals who send you clients, market your skills, and help you grow your firm. Even though it takes a lot of time, effort, and discipline to build and grow a referral network, doing so can take your business to the next level. To get started, join a networking group, attend networking events, and tap into your current and former client base. Here is a list of networking groups and events that you could get started with. Networking groups: Woodard Groups, Roundtable Labs, AICPA membership provides networking opportunities. Networking events: Scaling New Heights, QuickBooks Connect, AICPA Engage, AccountingWEB Live Summit and more.
Document Your Processes
Your processes are the lifeline of your accounting firm. Therefore, it only makes sense to document each one. Process documentation can be a real life saver in the event a key employee leaves. It may also increase productivity, ensure consistency and efficiency, help you stay compliant, and protect your trade secrets. Ideally, your processes would all be documented electronically so they can be easily accessed and edited. Some process documentation resources that are very helpful are Miro (an online collaborative whiteboard platform to bring teams together, anytime, anywhere) and Scribehow (allows you to turn any process into a step-by-step guide).
Identify the Proper Technology Resources
It’s highly likely that there are gaps between your processes. If so, you may benefit from automation technology that can streamline your operations and increase productivity and efficiency. With the right technology at your disposal, you can save time and money while offering the highest quality services to your clients. There are many platforms that allow you to research technology and applications. Two places are ProductHunt.com and Apps.com. There are also automation tools that allow you to sync apps together and create different triggers for actions “from tasks and workflows to apps and systems, build and automate anything”. Make and Zapier are two of the platforms that are widely used for this.
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