Firms must embrace the changes in order to remain successful in today’s shifting landscape amidst a pandemic and shifting work environments. In order to do this, one should know leadership and flexibility is key.
The Covid 19 Pandemic has shifted exponentially the remote working trend. Here are a few tips to help you form strategies for managing and engaging in a CPA firm of today.
Running a firm is a team sport
Your firm’s COO, CHRO, CIO, CMO and so on are essential to helping the managing partner run the firm and navigate challenges. You are no longer the star of the show, you need help, so utilize your team.
Innovation must become a strategy
Encourage your employees to be innovative. This will involve giving people time and space to innovate, rewarding employees for ideas and becoming comfortable with failure, as well as encouraging collaboration across departments.
You can’t ignore the client experience
A company should make sure that their client experience is consistent regardless of the person or department your client works with at your firm. The client’s entire journey starts even before they engage with your firm until even after you have delivered your service. Make sure your client service is focused on human interaction and directly supporting clients.
Find the right people and get them in the right roles
Since the onset of automation, firms can have more capacity as much of that manual, time-intensive work can be automated. Use that capacity to elevate people’s roles in the firm. You may want to motivate the professionals you maybe would have never considered initially as they can later become a very important part of your firm. Hire but inspire your staff to work to their highest potential as soon as possible
Pricing by the hour is becoming obsolete
If your firm uses “billable hours” as a management tool it is fastly becoming obsolete. You can track how people spend their time without billing clients based on those hours. If you find quicker ways of getting tasks done you cannot cheapen your service for this reason. Your mantra, in the CPA world today, should be ‘make more, work less’. If you do not do this your firm will struggle to attract and retain talent, hold on to clients and stay ahead of the competition.
