Communication: key to meeting challenges.

• Author: Fowler, Mark H.
• Position: Practice Management

While the CPA profession is always evolving, the dramatic shift in regulatory oversight and standard-setting has been fairly revolutionary during the past few years.

Interested in what this upheaval has meant to CPA firms, I've spent the past two years informally polling participants in my classes to research the question: What are the top six challenges of a CPA firm? I grouped their responses into partnered firms and sole proprietors.

Sole Practitioner Firms--Top Six Challenges: Finding, managing and keeping quality personnel; practice administration; sales and marketing efforts; time management (balancing personal and professional lives); communication with clients and within the firm; and maintaining the technology to best serve clients.

Partnered Firms--Top Six Challenges: Finding, managing and keeping quality personnel; firm management and administration; the partner decision-making process; partner succession; dealing with a reactive vs. proactive environment; and marketing, building and achieving value for services rendered.

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MEETING THE CHALLENGE

Of these 12 challenges, six are critical to firms of all sizes. And if you address them in a concentrated, focused and committed manner, success will follow.

ISSUE: Quality Staff

SOLUTION: Opportunity/Training. Give your staff the chance to explore, make mistakes and learn from those experiences, all of which will help them grow into responsible partners some day.

Augment this with interactive educational programs, including mentoring. Also, take inventory of the staff's individual skills and experiences and match those skills with tasks that will help clients.

For example, someone with good computer skills should work with the firm's and client's information technology needs.

Matching skills to tasks also provides staff members with a better understanding of where they fit in the organization and, if possible, in what direction they should take their career.

ISSUE: Expanded Services

SOLUTION: Understanding Client Needs. Listen to your clients, observe their patterns and talk with them to help you--and them--clarify their needs and wants. Then deliver the services they need.

ISSUE: Client Retention

SOLUTION: Positive Client Perception. It is essential to help clients understand and appreciate what we do and how we do it. If they just receive a tax return and are told how much to pay, where and when to mail, and our bill, what do they really get?

Clients need to...