How to make partner and still have a life‘ and author of ‘FT Guide To Business Networking‘, and guest blogger for Big4.com.

In today’s blog post, we look at the differences between a fixed share equity partner, (or as it is sometimes called fixed-share partner), a full equity partner or a salaried partner. There is a big difference in these three different types of partners.

This is an extract taken from ‘How to make partner and still have a life‘.

Very often when people are asked if they want to join the partnership, it isn’t made clear what you are being offered. Are you being offered the chance to be ‘full equity’ or a ‘fixed share equity’ partner?  Or are you being given the title of partner, i.e. becoming a salaried partner, but remain on a salary with the expectation that if you prove yourself you will become an equity partner in two to three years time?

The terms ‘full equity’ and ‘fixed share equity’ refers to how partners are remunerated, and typically their seniority and voting rights within the practice. New partners will normally join the firm as a junior fixed share equity partner and progress to senior fixed share equity partner over a number of years after which they are expected to become full equity partners.

(For help with your business case for partnership, download our guide to writing your business case for partnership from our FREE career kitbag)

Newly promoted partners are typically admitted at the lowest point of a profit-sharing scale. The scale is usually based on a percentage or a number of points. Over a period of time, the percentage is increased according to the next step on the scale, which is agreed and approved by the full equity partners. A fixed share equity partner will receive a monthly ‘drawing’ from the firm based on the percentage of points they have accumulated, and the firm’s anticipated financial performance.

At the end of the financial year if the firm has performed strongly, the equity partners share the profit based on their individual percentage of points they hold. In a number of large firms, up to 25 per cent of the profits is held back and paid as a bonus to a full equity partner based on their performance during that year or, in some firms, based on their performance over the last three years.

Full equity partners have typically demonstrated their ability to build a sustainable and profitable client portfolio. Unsurprisingly, full equity partners are almost always the most senior and influential partners within a practice, and have full voting rights.

This is an extract taken from ‘How to make partner and still have a life‘
Author Credit

Heather Townsend helps professionals become the Go-To-Expert. She is the author of the  award winning and best-selling book on business networking, the ‘FT Guide To Business Networking’ and the co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life’. Over the last decade she has worked with over 300 partners; coached, trained and mentored over 1000 professionals at every level of the UK’s most ambitious professional practices.

Heather blogs regularly at How to make partner and still have a life

The post Salaried vs fixed share vs equity partner – what exactly are you being offered? appeared first on Big4.com.

Guest blog by Heather Townsend, co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life‘ and author of ‘FT Guide To Business Networking‘, and guest blogger for Big4.com.

Part of your firm’s partnership admission process in your journey to make partner will probably involve a presentation of your business case and personal case for partnership to a selection of partners. These partners are typically some of the most influential in the partnership. Nerve-wracking stuff! This blog post will give you ten tips to help you ace this presentation (and any others you need to do!)

1. Keep your cool

Easier said than done – particularly if your promotion to partnership hangs in the balance. Nerves can sometimes be good, but can also lead to you drying up, sweating excessively, going red, stumbling over words or even becoming breathless. To help you keep your nerves working for you rather than against you, take a couple of deep and long breathes before you start your presentation. If at any point you feel the nerves getting the better of you, (which can happen to the best of us) stop, take a sip of water and some deep breathes, then carry on.

2. Envisage the worse case scenarios

Regardless of how much meticulous preparation you do, stuff – particularly when technology or people are involved – can go wrong. So do some thinking before you start the presentation as to what could go wrong. Projector break down? Have you got a couple of paper copies of your slides? Drying up? Use cue cards. Running over time? Go to the conclusion or ask whether you can have more time.

3. Practice, practice, practice

As the phrase goes, practice makes perfect. Who can you persuade to be your audience and give you real feedback? How about recording yourself using your iPhone or iPad? When you play it back, what do you notice? What could you improve on? Send a copy of your recording of you running through the presentation to your coach. They will be able to give you insightful feedback as to how you can improve.

4. Plan how long you will take

You will probably have been given a guide as to how long your presentation needs to be. When you do your presentation for real your nerves may make you talk faster – and you get through quicker. When you video yourself time how long it takes. If it’s too long, what can you chop out?

Download from our free Career Kitbag our free guide (email required) to designing and delivering presentations.

5. Visit the room where you will do the presentation

If possible, visit the room where you will present. Can you take the opportunity to actually practice in the room? Will there be lots of people in the room, and where will they sit? Now think about lines of sight and where you need to stand so you can be easily seen and heard. When you are in the room, take a moment to envisage it with the partner selection panel present. Imagine the presentation going really well – what will you hear, see and feel?

6. Plan for questions

Make sure you plan to leave a large question and answer session at the end. This is a chance for you to really engage your audience in your business and personal case for partnership. Do spend some time thinking of the questions you will get asked – and these may be the classic difficult interview questions:

• why should we promote you to partner over some of the other candidates?
• if we could only promote one partner this year, why should it be you?
• if we could only promote one partner this year, why should it NOT be you?
• what weaknesses in the partnership will you strengthen by being promoted to partner?
• what will cause you to fail as a partner?
• what would your team say your greatest weakness is?

Remember that your partners in the Q&A are not looking for you to repeat what you said, but want to hear the logic or problem solving process you used to come to your conclusion. If the partners still don’t like your argument then check to see whether you have been misunderstood and if necessary clarify. Don’t argue for argument’s sake, (even if you are a lawyer), but if you are not convincing the partners, then agree to disagree. Now is not the time to score cheap points…

7. Speak to your mentor about your presentation

Your mentor may even be on the panel you are presenting too. Ask them for tips on what you should say and do in your presentation. Ask them to help you rehearse your presentation and ask them to give you feedback.

8. Work out if any partner particularly bothers you

Let’s be honest, some partners can make anyone feel uncomfortable. If you know that your nemesis is going to be on the panel, take some time to work out what it is that bothers you about them. How could you normalise this reaction? Could you reframe how you react to them? At the end of the day, aim to not take anything from the partner that bothers you personally – they are there to do a job on behalf of the partnership – and may have been asked to play bad cop.

9. Get to know more of the partners BEFORE the presentation

Getting to partner is as much about how many advocates you have in the partnership as it is about your business case. Before the presentation spend time with partners in and out of your department, and get their thoughts on your business and personal case. Ask them what you should highlight in your presentation and what skills they think you bring that the partnership needs.

10. Identify the main points of your business case for partnership

Remember that you are there to engage your partners with your business plan. It doesn’t matter whether you are in an accountancy firm or consultancy – your job is to convince your partners that it is worth them placing a bet on you and your business case. With this in mind, take the time to analyse the main selling points of your business case. If you only had a minute to ‘sell’ your business case to your partners, what stuff would you keep in or take out?

Listen to our 35 minute podcast ‘creating a winning business case for partnership‘ to help you write a winning business case for partnership. 

If you would like help to write your business case for partnership, then how about downloading from our Free Career Kitbag our FREE guide to building your personal business case for partnership which contains real successful partner’s business cases(email required)

Author Credit

Heather Townsend helps professionals become the Go-To-Expert. She is the author of the  award winning and best-selling book on business networking, the ‘FT Guide To Business Networking’ and the co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life’. Over the last decade she has worked with over 300 partners; coached, trained and mentored over 1000 professionals at every level of the UK’s most ambitious professional practices.

Heather blogs regularly at How to make partner and still have a life

The post 10 ways to excel in your presentation for partnership appeared first on Big4.com.

When someone has a career spanning 30 years in business auditing and consulting and ranks as one of the founding members of a major player in the industry like Protiviti, it comes as no surprise they’ve been inducted into the Hall of Distinguished Audit Practitioners. Protiviti’s senior managing director, Bob Hirth, had both those credentials and more on his illustrious resume when he talked with Big4.com just after the induction ceremony, which was held at this year’s IIA General Audit Management conference in Las Vegas.

He started the conversation by telling us about the beginnings of his present company.

Bob Hirth

“I’m an alumnus from Arthur Andersen and spent more than 25 years there,” he said, adding that he started working there when there were eight large accounting firms. Hirth’s road to prominence in the profession also had an international leg when he went to Melbourne to work before returning to the United States in 1991 to California.

“I had about a 10-year stint here in the U.S. after my three years in Australia before the firm ‘ceased operations’ as we sometimes say in 2002, and we formed Protiviti,” he said.

New Venture

Of course, more than just a timeline and some circumstances went into the new venture. Hirth was also happy to talk about the motivation that steered what was a fledgling operation and helped to carve out its path to prominence.

“The absolute number one motivation for everybody in founding Protiviti was the philosophy that the status quo was not an option.”

He went on to say that everyone working at Arthur Andersen at the time understood their current jobs were soon coming to an end, and what needed to be done became quite clear.

“Survival is an important emotion or instinct,” he said, giving a nod to the practical side of the transformation.

Positive Drivers

There were other factors as well, and Hirth went on to explain some of the underlying, positive drivers.

“We had a value at Arthur Andersen called stewardship,” he said. “The idea being that when you became a partner at our firm you agreed to try to make it stronger before you left than what you had inherited.”

Hirth said although the concept changed slightly when it became apparent to everyone they needed to find another place to work, there was a general consensus that the idea of stewardship needed to follow Arthur Andersen’s ex-employees wherever they went.

“I like to suggest then that the founding of Protiviti became a group event,” he said. “I would say that for every night in the early part of 2002, conference calls were held with a regular group of people trying to figure out how we could demonstrate this value of stewardship and possibly take our Business Process Risk Consulting (BPRC) practice somewhere.”

So, on May 22^nd 2002, Hirth and a group of his fellow partners and colleagues were employees of Arthur Andersen, and on the next day, 650 people started what was first called Newco since the new firm didn’t have a name as yet. The philosophy behind what was to become Protiviti was one of the first priorities.

“There were some words surrounding values we wanted to bring forward,” Hirth said, “and those values were around words like professionalism, productivity, objectivity, integrity, creativity and the like.”

Branding Efforts

The branding efforts that followed resulted in Newco’s name transforming to Protiviti.

Hirth’s internal auditing presentations have brought him international recognition and he’s written or published numerous articles, white papers, resource guides and research studies. He has served as the San Francisco IIA chapter president and multiple terms on the San Francisco chapter of The IIA Board of Governors, as well as other volunteer positions for IIA organizations. His insights into the challenges faced by the internal auditing profession today are highly valued.

He categorized the pace of change, emerging risks and global operations under one heading.

“Because of technology, primarily, the rate of change is a lot faster,” he said. “Things can happen in minutes or almost seconds today and ripple across the globe.” He went on to say the pace of change creates the emerging risks mentioned, and these risks can impact all companies, even those that don’t think of themselves as global in nature.

Finally, among the highlights in his illustrious career, Hirth includes the people he’s met and the ability to mentor them at the top.

“Like any coach, there’s been satisfaction in seeing people grow, mature, fail a little bit, but ultimately succeed,” he said.

The post Hall of Distinguished Audit Practitioners Latest Inductee Bob Hirth talks about the birth of Protiviti and his Career appeared first on Big4.com.

By Rob Starr, Content Manager, Big4.com     

By all accounts, the new Accenture Delivery Center in Austin Texas will work to enhance the company’s health and public sector work across North America by providing software development and support with consulting and technology services.

David McCurley, managing director of Accenture’s public sector software business recently talked with Big4.com and provided an overview of the software to be supported by the new Delivery Center in Austin that will add 300 jobs by the end of the calendar year and streamline government social service programs.  

David McCurley

“This has been along time in the planning,” McCurley says. “We worked very hard to verify some assumptions we had about the marketplace and then drive something new and different into it.” 

Software Applications

Recently, Accenture has spent time developing and launching a flexible, service-based technology platform. There have been software applications to enable public agencies to upgrade or replace legacy IT systems added as well in an integrated, flexible manner to reduce technology and management costs and improve service delivery. These new software products include the Accenture Public Service Platform, the Accenture Benefits Management System, the Accenture Citizen Self-Service Portal and the Accenture Public Health Platform.

McCurley was the logical choice as the front man for this project. He will have 29 years with Accenture in May and most of that time has been spent working with government agencies. One of his endeavors with Accenture was looking at the benefits and service delivery programs that governments across the globe were offering their citizens. 

“In the course of that we started a process of looking across the globe looking at programs our clients were offering their citizens and if there was a more economical and business successful way that we could look at that service delivery model that was being accomplished.”

Software Capabilities

Accenture and McCurley found the answer lay with the company’s software capabilities and the understanding that people’s needs often crisscross from one government agency to another.

“Historically these services have been provided through a series of stovepipe funding mechanisms,” McCurley said. “For example, cash assistance is provided through one agency, medical assistance is provided through another agency, housing assistance is through another agency. Each agency has their funding sources and their own manner in which they deal with the public.”

One of the issues that Accenture tackled sprung from the fact they found most people’s issues didn’t fall neatly under the umbrella of just one program and many of the existing business systems Accenture’s clients were using didn’t take into account this crossover.

“The business systems that our clients had to bring to bear on those problems are not designed to be integrated and to share information and give a broad perspective on the underlying cause,” McCurley said adding that in response Accenture has developed a model for social services to look at these types of issues.

“We made a decision to look at the way software was being provided to this marketplace about three years ago.”

Stovepipe method

Historically, software was provided to the relevant agencies either using a ‘stovepipe’ method where significant customization was needed or off the shelf systems that were often a bad fit. Accenture saw the opportunity presented here.

“What we saw was the need for  purpose built software solutions that bring the benefits of an off the shelf solution which includes the functional purpose and depth of custom solutions that have been out there historically for decades,” he said.

These hybrid software programs also include, among other advancements, a self service portal for citizens.

“We know that governments are being faced more and more with pressures to take work out of their offices and citizens want access to information about their programs and case,” he said.

The post Accenture’s David McCurley Talks About Software Supported By The New Delivery Center in Austin appeared first on Big4.com.

The post Guard Your Culture to Retain Talent appeared first on Big4.com.

Making a bank a successful business has taken on a special importance and significance since the fiscal crisis of 2008 ended.  When WeiserMazars recently announced their participation in The Good Bank Initiative that will look to put together the ingredient list for these post financial crisis institutions, they joined as one of the participating countries in the Mazars Group, along with Credit Suisse and SAP in a global dialogue.

WeiserMazars’ Stephen Brecher recently talked with Big4.com about the origins of the five month program that will stimulate a debate around what makes a socially engaged bank a good enterprise.

“There are four countries that are heavily involved in this project,” Brecher said. “France where Mazars was founded, the UK where our partner was (until fairly recently) the Irish Bank regulator, the US and Italy.”

He went on to say two initial motivators sparked the global conversation that will include debates, research and articles all leading up to a live and online broadcast originating in London on June 4^th.

Mazars’ Culture

“In order to understand why a firm like Mazars would want to get involved with this, it’s really important to understand Mazars culture,” Brecher explains noting that although WeiserMazars is an independent member firm, there is still a strong global partnership.

Stephen Brecher

“So there is a connectivity that is unique among the other major global accounting firms.”

There will be three key themes guiding The Good Bank initiative and these include dialogue around the innovative, the trustworthy and the effective bank. Along with the aforementioned broadcast, a summary report is scheduled to be released in early July.

Brecher went on to say that WeiserMazars’ desire for both transparency and openness was the second driver that drew the firm to The Good Bank. He went on to talk about the rapidly changing times for the financial industry.

“In the financial services industry, banks, investment banks, insurance companies are facing many reputational challenges,” he said noting there have been a number of “missteps” over the last several years leading to a deluge in regulatory transformations in the UK and United States.

Collective Intelligence

“We believe that we can provide collective intelligence from our experts in different jurisdictions. We have shared values and we believe that it’s important to have a dialogue on what’s in the pubic interest,” Brecher said adding that WeiserMazars was fully aware the focus also needed to be placed on shareholder value.

He also discussed several issues facing the banking sector including capping executive compensation.

“Here’s where there’s a balance for the industry,” Brecher says, “between how to compensate competent executives, how to service clients and provide liquidity to the marketplace in an efficient manner  and also provide shareholder value.”

He said that balancing those three items was one of the issues he planned to bring up for debate.

Regulatory Environment

One of the other topics Brecher stressed was the regulatory environment, primarily in the United States and Europe, and how the need to gauge the amount of available capital was driving regulatory change on a more regional rather than global stage.

“One of the criticisms during the financial crisis was that banks were not providing liquidity but if the need to have more capital drives that part of it, it will reduce the ability to provide liquidity,” he said adding there was another balancing element needed like the one for executive compensations.

Beyond being a WeiserMazars partner, Stephen Brecher is also an ambassador of The Good Bank Initiative.

The post WeiserMazars’ Stephen Brecher Talks With Big4.com About The Good Bank Initiative appeared first on Big4.com.

After nearly 20 years of outstanding service, Jim O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, has decided to retire from the firm later this year.

Jim is an influential economist and thought leader, and is regarded as an expert in the world’s foreign exchange and bond markets. Importantly, he has identified revolutionary economic trends, defining the concept of the BRICs which has become synonymous with the emergence of Brazil, Russia, India and China as growth opportunities of the future.

He joined Goldman Sachs in 1995 as a partner in the roles of co-head of Global Economics Research and chief currency economist. He was named head of Global Economics, Commodities and Strategy Research in 2001. In 2006, Jim joined the firm’s European Management Committee. In 2010, he took up his current role as chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and since then he has strengthened our research discipline and enhanced communication among investment professionals across asset classes

He is involved in a number of non-profit organizations. He is chairman and a founding trustee of the London-based charity SHINE and also serves on the board of Teach for All and a number of other charities specializing in education. Jim has been the recipient of many awards, including an honorary doctorate in 2009 from the Institute of Education, University of London, for his educational philanthropy.

Jim is a member of the UK-India Round Table and the UK India Business Council, and is also chairman of the Greater Manchester Local Enterprise Partnership Advisory. He previously served as a non-executive director of Manchester United before it returned to private ownership in 2005.

The post Goldman Sachs: Jim O’Neill to Retire appeared first on Big4.com.

Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Guest blog by Heather Townsend, co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life‘ and author of ‘FT Guide To Business Networking‘, and guest blogger for Big4.com.

Your partners are very unlikely to hand you your first clients on a plate. After all, they (your partners) probably have their drawings and share of the firm’s profits directly linked to the size of the client portfolio. This means that you can not ‘hang onto their coat-tails’ and aim to be a replica of them. You will need your own technical specialism and niche, to be able to attract referrals to you rather than your partners.

See here for other benefits to committing to a niche.

In this blog post I will take you through the five steps you need to do to find your niche.

When you establish a niche of your own, it allows you to specialise and become the Go-To-Expert on your chosen topic.

“That’s all very well” you may be thinking, “but how on earth do I work out what my niche should be?”

The hard part of finding a niche is identifying and choosing one where you are confident that there is enough of a market that will be motivated to buy your services, and make a good living from it. Here are a couple of poorly chosen niches or “non-niches”

Accountant specialising in Owner Managed Businesses (OMBs). This is what most mid-tier and small firms of accountants specialise in.  This could become…..

Accountant specialising in working with owner managed financial services businesses

Management Consultant. There are a huge amount of management consultant. What makes you different from all the others? This could become…..

Management Consultant specialising in working with fast-growing technology companies

Can you see the difference? You may find our FREE guide to choosing and capitalising in your niche useful (email required).

To find a niche that will work for you, there are five simple steps to follow.

1. Search the internet to find professionals with a similar skill-set to you. Write down all the sector specialisms and ‘niches’ that you find.

2. Write a list of at least ten possible niches that you could adopt.

Author Credit

Heather Townsend helps professionals become the Go-To-Expert. She is the author of the  award winning and best-selling book on business networking, the ‘FT Guide To Business Networking’ and the co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life’. Over the last decade she has worked with over 300 partners; coached, trained and mentored over 1000 professionals at every level of the UK’s most ambitious professional practices.

Heather Townsend will be appearing at the ‘How to make partner‘ conference in London on the 24th April 2013.

The post 5 simple steps to finding your niche and building your client portfolio appeared first on Big4.com.

Thankfully, not everyone believes that malarkey. Andrea Bocelli didn’t start singing opera seriously until the age of 34. Phyllis Diller didn’t become a comedian until 37. One of my idols, Zig Ziglar, didn’t start his professional speaking career until his 40s. Julia Childs didn’t learn to cook until 40 and didn’t start the show that made her famous until 50. Actor Alan Rickman started his film career at 46. The great Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man, was 43 when he began drawing his legendary superheroes. And let’s not forget Harland Sanders, who started Kentucky Fried Chicken at age 65.

You have a choice as life goes by. You can fear how little time you have left or you can increasingly use the time you have fearlessly. These famous achievers chose not to mourn the passing of time. Instead, they chose to continue seeking possibilities.

I think that if life is to be truly lived, we should all follow their example.

Dr. Dewett is an author, speaker, coach, management professor, consultant, and Harley Davidson nut. His job is to build better leaders and teams. He is the author of The Little Black Book of Leadership. Recent clients include: Booz Allen Hamilton, State Farm, JM Smucker, Medtronic, TGI Fridays, Standard Register, Cox Media, NCR, Sogeti, Emerson, University of Tennessee, RustOleum, and many more. His unique brand of energetic leadership knowledge has resulted in quotes in the New York Times, BusinessWeek, Forbes, CNN, Investors Business Daily, Entrepreneur, MSNBC, and hundreds of other outlets. After beginning his career with Andersen Consulting and Ernst & Young, he has since consulted with, trained, spoken to, or coached thousands of professionals around the world. Visit his home online at www.drdewett.com.

The post YOUTH IS A STATE OF MIND appeared first on Big4.com.

Once you decide that finance and accounting is the right field for you, it is time to decide on a career path. There are many paths you can choose from, but not all of them are right for everyone.

When you’re trying to decide what career is right for you, there are several factors you must take into consideration. Some of these include:

* The type of client contact you want
* The type of accounting or financial planning you enjoy
* The amount of supervision and training you want
* The pay structure you need

Some careers in this industry have more client contact than others. If you enjoy being around people, careers like financial planning, accounting, or tax preparation may be right for you. If you don’t really enjoy being around people, careers in auditing, underwriting, or analysis may be more appropriate.
The type of accounting or financial planning you enjoy may sway your decision about what career you want to pursue. If you enjoy scrutinizing account ledgers, auditing is an option. If you like analyzing company information and financial records, investing may be a good choice. If you enjoy finding ways to save companies or individuals money, analysis jobs may be ideal. If you like determining risks, jobs in origination may be the best bet. If you enjoy handling money, bank management may be a viable option. When you are reading through job descriptions, make sure you check to see if the duties are in line with what you enjoy.

Direct Supervision

The amount of direct supervision and training you want is another factor you must consider. If you don’t like a lot of supervision, auditing or personal investment banking may be the best options for you since you likely won’t have someone watching over your shoulder on a daily basis. If you don’t mind supervision, corporate accounting and bank-based jobs are good options. Almost every career in the finance industry will involve some level of training. Check out the continuing education requirements and training length for each job to determine if you can handle them.

Lastly, you have to consider the pay structure you want. The vast majority of investment careers are commission based. That means that you have to perform well to get paid. Some of these do have a base pay as well. You may decide that you need a regular and dependable paycheck. If that is the case, working for a bank or as an hoy or salaried financial professional is your best bet.

Each of these factors will have a direct impact on the number of career choices you have in this field, so it is important to think long and hard about each one. Depending on your state’s requirements, some of the available jobs in this industry may require advanced training, testing, or certification, so you will have to check your state’s laws and regulations prior to determining your career path.

Nancy Anderson is the communities and article Editor for Beyond.com. Nancy has 10 years experience in the online job search business with Beyond. Nancy’s team produces dozens of articles every month for top internet sites. Follow Nancy and the Beyond team on https://twitter.com/Beyond_com

The post What Career is Right for You? appeared first on Big4.com.

Not too long ago, when people thought of accountants, an image of a thin, balding, middle-aged man with a pocket protector and calculator sprung to mind. However, the role of the public accountant has morphed into a dynamic, exciting and profitable career choice for many from all walks of life. Whether you choose to work as an accountant for a public agency or opt to apply your accounting expertise in a more creative way, there are many advantages to becoming a public accountant.

Advantage #1: Career Advancement and Earning Potential

A public accountant has the opportunity to advance in almost any company. Employers view those with an accounting degree as smart and dedicated, and even more so if the degree is coupled with a CPA. Speaking of the CPA, if you are on the fence regarding whether you should pursue the certification, it is important to note that in order to advance in many companies, the CPA designation is required. There’s also an income incentive: studies have shown that CPAs can earn 10 to 41 percent more than regular public accountants.

Advantage #2: Attain Experience Faster

When you attain your accounting degree, you can choose to enter the accounting public sector or the private sector. Private sector accountants, especially at the entry level, typically work with only one or two aspects of accounting. For example, they might be responsible for the accounts receivable ledger and maybe do a company audit once or twice a year. A public accountant, however, might have a stable of clients for whom he must provide all accounting services, from tax preparation and audits to monthly statements. An entry-level public accountant will attain more hands-on experience in all aspects of accounting than an entry-level private accountant.

Advantage #3: Job and Financial Security

As long as there are businesses, there will be a need for accountants. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs for accountants are expected to grow 16 percent between 2010 and 2020. Salaries for accountants are also stable; the median income for an accountant was $61,690 as of May 2010.

Advantage #4: Variety

A public accountant is no longer forced to work for an accounting firm working on balance sheets and tax returns. Accountants hold a variety of jobs for a variety of companies. For example, the Federal Bureau of Investigations employs public accountants as agents. The government also hires public accountant as revenue agents, both inside and outside the IRS. Many private companies hire public accountants to serve as CFOs and CEOs, and corporate attorneys hire public accountants to search for signs of fraud and other illegal activities that might have been committed through an accounting process.

Becoming a public accountant no longer means being chained to a desk shuffling papers eight hours a day. As a public accountant, you will have a variety of options, from where you work to what you do. So, whether you want to help a family plan for college tuition and retirement or help the FBI crack a case, as a public accountant, you will always have work available to you.

Nancy Anderson is the communities and article Editor for Beyond.com.  Nancy has 10 years experience in the online job search business with Beyond.  Nancy’s team produces dozens of articles every month for top internet sites.  Follow Nancy and the Beyond team on https://twitter.com/BeyondJobs.

The post The Advantages of Careers in Public Accounting appeared first on Big4.com.

Academic researchers claim that lying is part of our daily experience, necessary to grease the social wheels appropriately.

But, how does that affect us as leaders?

If leading is about inspiring people to take action around a collective vision and goal, how does lying fit in?

We lie to:

• avoid feeling something unpleasant
• prevent from hurting someone’s feelings
• hide a mistake
• avoid someone’s negative reaction
• try to control a situation or environment (and how others see us)
• avoid undesired consequences

The above list shows that there are lots of reasons for lying, but they all undermine our leadership effectiveness and that’s the problem. Lying creates the fastest way to:

• erode our self-confidence
• abate our credibility
• reduce our influence over others
• strengthen adversaries by giving them darts to throw
• weaken our relationships
• give us more work to do (remembering & covering up lies is a full-time job)

With all that baggage, how can we initiate great things and create great outcomes as leaders? And if we are already creating great results, what could we do if we had the courage to tell the truth?

Imagine yourself as a leader who could always tell the truth. What would you have to think, feel and do to make that happen?

Eleni Pallas was a management consultant with Deloitte in Europe, now an Executive Coach working with global leaders and teams.

The post Leading and Lying appeared first on Big4.com.

Guest blog by Heather Townsend, co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life‘ and author of ‘FT Guide To Business Networking‘, and guest blogger for Big4.com:

You may have top-notch credentials and a client following to die for, but if your firm (even the Big 4) doesn’t have the space or the inclination to admit a new partner, you would be better off seeking partnership in another firm. This article explores four of the main reasons why a new partner will be needed in your firm. 

Before we look at the four reasons, let’s dispel one myth. Technical ability will not be enough on its own to get you to partnership. A great technician is likely to stop as a senior manager, salaried partner or director. To get to partner you need to bring something extra to the partnership table – something that they need. Very rarely you get the situation where a non-partner has become exceptional at winning work and has built up a client following that the firm can’t afford to lose. In this situation, a firm may break all it’s rules and admit someone to the partnership.

1. Partners getting near to retirement age

In most partnership agreements there is a clause for what age partners need to retire by. (This will definitely be the case of the big 4 or large firms) It’s not always set in stone, but not unusual for partnerships to force out their older members. Many partnerships have this clause to make sure that they don’t have very long-serving partners stopping promising junior talent making it through from the ranks.

Very often the retiring partner has a client portfolio which will need someone to take it over. That person could be you. Do you have a good connection with that partner? Do you have the right skills to take over his portfolio. Maybe more importantly, do you want to take over this partner’s client portfolio? It may not be in the best of health! (Our FREE guide to doing your due diligence on your firm may come in handy here, email required)

2. Technical areas or sectors becoming  very important to the firm

Look at your firm’s business plans – where do they see the growth coming for the firm? Growth in a practice area is always an opportunity for aspiring partners to grow a portfolio and stake a claim at the partnership table. You need to do more than just look at the firm’s business plans, do your homework and spend time talking with partners in the firm. Where do they see the growth coming from in their firm? What are the technical areas which are being more important to the firm?

3. Areas of the practice which are ‘light’ on partners

Sometimes a part of the firm becomes very successful – and there is too much work for the existing partners to handle (regardless of their ability to delegate) Consequently, this may be an opportunity for you to make partner in that area (with the right technical skills). The partners in the department will need to be able to have an extra pair of hands to handle the client relationships – which is an opportunity for you.

4. Departments where senior professionals have exited the firm and left a gap

There is always a pecking order and hierarchy within a firm. However, this can sometimes get disrupted by prospective partners leaving the firm before they make partner. Not only does this create opportunities for you to get your hands on more responsibility earlier, but there are less people ahead of you to make partner before you.

In summary, there are no hard and fast rules where the next partner will come from in the firm. Do your homework and look around you – there maybe an opportunity begging for you to take an advantage of. Make sure your personal business case for partnership (Download our FREE guide to writing your personal business case for partnership here, email required) shows how you are THE person to strengthen the partnership.

Author Credit

Heather Townsend helps professionals become the ‘Go To’ Expert. She is the author of the  award winning and best-selling book on business networking, the ‘FT Guide To Business Networking’ and the co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life’. Over the last decade she has worked with over 300 partners; coached, trained and mentored over 1000 professionals at every level of the UK’s most ambitious professional practices.

Heather Townsend will be appearing at the ‘How to make partner‘ conference in London on the 24th April 2013.

The post Why does your firm need a new partner? appeared first on Big4.com.

by David Tovey

In conversation with a professional services recruitment consultant recently he mentioned that many technically qualified individuals ask him to find them roles with no selling involved. ‘The thing is David’ he said, ‘all the roles I need to fill have the ability to win business as one of the main requirements’

Of course the reality is that today there is no shortage of technically qualified professionals to provide their services; being a great technician is rarely a differentiator these days. Business development (selling) is now part of the job and clients expect us to be good at it.  The 2012 FT Effective Client – Advisor Relationships report highlighted clients demand that firms move from partner centric technical advisers to client centric commercial advisers. There is nothing more commercial and client centric than getting business development right.

We are all in sales

So the worst kept secret in professional service firms is out – we are all in sales. Whether you call it marketing, business development, client development or selling; from the moment you start a phone call, the moment you connect at a networking event or begin a meeting with a client; they know you want to win business. They know you want to sell.

Why is there reluctance by some to accept that selling is part of the professional’s role? Because many professionals still misunderstand what ‘selling’ is really about.

A definition

When I ask professionals I work with for a definition of selling their response usually involves words like persuade and convince. When I ask them to describe typical sales people the words they use are usually less than complimentary!

As Charles H Green, author of The Trusted Advisor, said in the foreword for my book ‘The world of sales and the world of marketing have been plagued by the same problem for at least a century. The problem historically facing sales is the tendency to view selling as a method of controlling, manipulating, or otherwise inducing the buyer to do what the seller wants’.

No wonder many professionals assume that professional ethics and integrity somehow need to be suspended if that is what selling is about – and no wonder many professionals try to find roles that keep them as far away from business development as possible!

The actual definition of selling is really simple – ‘the exchange of goods and services for money’. No mention here of ‘persuading’ or ‘convincing’ – or of anything that involves manipulation.  In fact it is impossible to build long term client relationships using any form of control or manipulation.  Any client who feels an advisor is trying to convince, persuade or manipulate them at best becomes a single transaction – not a client for life who buys and re-buys.

Winning clients for life
Selling isn’t an innate quality that some people who are born with the ‘right’ personality have; it is a process and a set of skills and behaviours that can be learned and developed.

Principled Selling – selling ethically and with integrity is based on five principles.

1. 1.    Selling is about motivation not manipulation

A core Principled Selling behaviour is to be a master of motivation not manipulation. Principled Selling motivates buyers to want to meet you, to want to do business with you by building trusted relationships long before trying to win business.  When motivation is at the heart of how you sell, the whole process of winning business becomes client centric, more natural, more comfortable and more enjoyable for buyers and sellers.

1. 2.    Profitable relationships require investment

Any relationship personal or business that is going to flourish needs investment – putting effort into the relationship before expecting anything in return.

Knowing the profile of your future dream clients allows you to invest in building relationships with the right audience – sharing free valuable and useful content using the internet and social media, building trusted relationships and attracting the type of client you would love to win.

Get this right and the motivation to want to know more is already coming from the potential client.

1. 3.    There must be congruency throughout the business development process

Business development and service delivery has to be joined up. Selling messages and selling behaviours have to be congruent with the expectation set by your marketing messages. Delivery of your products or services must be congruent with the promises made through marketing and sales activities.

You also need to act in congruence with your organizations stated values and in congruence with your own values. If there is a mismatch between any of these – when people or organizations are seen as saying one thing but doing another – it becomes impossible to build long term trusted relationships

1. 4.    Long term relationships depend on being authentic

Being authentic is more than being honest – it implies never attempting to manipulate another person’s perception. For instance – when you listen to a client it is because you are genuinely interested not because you use listening as a technique to seduce them into believing you care.

We all recognize if someone is being insincere – and it damages trust.

1. 5.    Being human gets results

Being human is about having equal status between buyer and seller – not put you selling hat on and changing your personality when you are out to win business.   People still want to do business with people – with other human beings who are genuinely interested in them and who invest time in understanding them and their organisation.

We are all in sales – be proud of it and be good at it.

David Tovey is author of Principled Selling- How to Win More Business Without Selling Your Soul, published by Kogan Page and heads up The Principled Group Ltd. Check out David’s blog www.principledselling.org.

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Guest blog by Heather Townsend, co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life‘ and author of ‘FT Guide To Business Networking‘, and guest blogger for Big4.com:

There are many reasons why your application for partnership is not accepted. Here are the five most common mistakes aspiring partners make when they apply for admission to the partnership.

1. Not building up a fan base in the partnership

Only partners, understandably, have the right to sit and vote at the partnership table. Your partners will, behind closed doors and without consulting your opinion, discuss whether or not you are a suitable person to join the partnership. The more vocal supporters of your cause, the greater the likelihood that you will get the right result from the vote. Unsurprisingly the stronger your power base within the partners of your firm, the less it matters as to what you have written in your personal business case for partnership.

2. Writing their personal business case in isolation

Your personal business case for partnership, needs to be written in consultation with not just the partners in your department but partners across the firm. Depending on how your partnership admissions process works, you may find that all or a fixed amount of partners needs to give you the thumbs up. Consequently, the more partners who feel as if they have had a say in your business case and have been involved in the writing of it, the stronger the chance that you get the green light. Particularly if those partners are the movers, shapers and groovers! (For more help with your personal business, download our free guide to writing your personal business case for partnership, email required)

3. Setting a fixed time frame for when they will make partner

No one can with any degree of certainty predict what will happen in the marketplace. In times of economic hardship firms tend to reduce their partnership numbers rather than admit new, potentially untried partners. Additionally, there may be better and stronger candidates for partnership ahead of you. Which are two reasons why equity partners generally get very annoyed when ‘young whippersnappers’ decide on when they are going to make partner. By all means set a general timeframe, just make sure it’s not a ‘fixed, must be this year’, type of timeframe.

When the partners add in a new equity partner, they are in effect sharing equity in the firm with the newly promoted partner. Consequently, it will always be their decision, not your decision when you will make partner. Don’t forget this!

4. Becoming over-fixated on their technical ability

When you become a partner you move from being employed to self-employed and become an owner of the firm. As a result, it is no longer about your technical ability, it’s about your ability to grow the firm, build & lead a team, win clients and bring something extra to the partnership.

5. Not spending enough time on putting together their personal business case for partnership

Your personal business case for partnership is not something you can dash off in an evening. Ideally you want to be working on this at least 18-24 months before you want to be admitted to the partnership. To help you form your business case, you want to complete a series of conversations with partners inside and outside of your department, to canvas their opinions on your personal business plan.

If you are thinking or writing your personal business case for partnership, then download our FREE guide to writing your personal business case, email required.

What help has your firm given you with your personal business case?

Author Credit

Heather Townsend helps professionals become the ‘Go To’ Expert. She is the author of the  award winning and best-selling book on business networking, the ‘FT Guide To Business Networking’ and the co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life’. Over the last decade she has worked with over 300 partners; coached, trained and mentored over 1000 professionals at every level of the UK’s most ambitious professional practices.

Heather Townsend will be appearing at the ‘How to make partner‘ conference in London on the 24th April 2013.

The post 5 typical mistakes aspiring partners make when going for partnership appeared first on Big4.com.

Guest blog by Heather Townsend, co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life‘ and author of ‘FT Guide To Business Networking‘, and guest blogger for Big4.com:

When your partners sit around the partnership table and discuss who they would like to make up to partner, how many partners are ‘fighting your corner’? You will not be there in person – so you need some powerful friends around the table looking after your interests.

So, how do you build up this power base? Particularly if you are part of a big firm?

1. Build up your internal and external market value

It’s a given that your client work needs to have done some of the talking for you. Your financials need to be strong, and clients need to be saying good things about you. i.e. you need to be in demand both by partners in the firm and clients external to the firm.

2. Take part in cross-firm initiatives and projects

There are always opportunities to get involved in cross firm projects outside of your client work. Do choose carefully, and aim to be present on committees, steering groups, projects or even assignments where you will get to increase your internal network and contact with key influential partners.

3. Talk to partners outside of your department

Create the time to go and get to know partners outside of your department. Do take this opportunity to ask them about what the practice needs in its new partners. Get their views on your personal business case. There is no stronger advocate than a partner who feels that they have had a say in your personal business case…

You may find our FREE guide to building your personal networking strategy useful, email required.

4. Avoid having a fixed date in time when you have to be a partner

One of the faux-pas that many potential partners make is having a fixed idea of when they need to be a partner. Equity partners get incredibly cheesed off hearing that ‘so-and-so’ has to be a partner by next year. By all means have an ‘ideal timescale’ in your head, or a provisional loose timescale that you are publicly working towards. Just don’t go around telling partners that you will be a partner by this point in time… (For other tips and practical help on creating your personal business case for partnership, download our FREE guide to writing your personal business case for partnership.)

5. Go to firm socials

These normally give you great access to many of the firm’s partners who you would not normally bump into. Take the opportunity to talk to partners you don’t know at these events and also organise a 1:2:1 later.

6. Take an strong interest in them and their part of the practice

Almost treat your partners as if they are your best client – after all, they are probably the biggest stakeholder in your career right now.

7. Choose an influential mentor

I clearly remember working with the head of audit at my old firm. I was amazed how much influence and power this partner yielded. These are the people who can easily facilitate your path to partnership and ‘sell’ you to the other partners. (Who are these partners in your firm?) Sometimes just the association between the two of you is enough to get the partners to vote for you.

You may find our FREE (email required) guide for mentees useful reading to help you get the most out of your relationship with your mentor.

8. Find referrals for them

There is nothing quite like bringing in high quality referrals for other partners to generate a great fan base for you. Partners love work winners and in particular, work winners who bring in stuff for them personally.

You may find our FREE guide to building your personal networking strategy useful, email required.

In summary

If you are to successfully make the transition up to partnership, then you will need a fan base amongst the partners in your firm. (For other tips and practical help on creating your personal business case for partnership, download our FREE guide to writing your personal business case for partnership.)

Author Credit

Heather Townsend helps professionals become the ‘Go To’ Expert. She is the author of the  award winning and best-selling book on business networking, the ‘FT Guide To Business Networking’ and the co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life’. Over the last decade she has worked with over 300 partners; coached, trained and mentored over 1000 professionals at every level of the UK’s most ambitious professional practices.

Heather Townsend will be appearing at the ‘How to make partner‘ conference in London on the 24th April 2013.

The post 8 ways of building up your power base amongst your partners appeared first on Big4.com.

How often do you jump into a car or taxi and show up at a prospect’s office ready to ask questions and pitch your solutions—but without really having prepared? Many senior executives I’ve interviewed have told me this happens all the time. And, they usually add, they aren’t impressed with someone who walks in knowing very little about their business and their issues.

You have to ask yourself a series of simple questions to help ensure you’ve prepared adequately for each and every client meeting.  Here they are:

1. Have you discussed the meeting agenda with your prospect, and discovered what in particular they would like to cover?
2. Do you know who will attend from the client’s side?
3. If more than one of you is attending from your own firm, have you agreed what your roles are going to be?
4. Have you thoroughly researched the company and the individual you’re meeting with?
5. Have you developed some understanding about what this client’s priorities and goals are right now?
6. What are the 3-4 thought provoking questions you’d like to ask your prospect?
7. What client examples have you prepared that will be relevant to this executive?
8. Do you have a “point of view” to share about the prospect’s industry or the trends that are affecting their organization?
9. Are you potentially trying to accomplish too much in this first meeting, perhaps in response to pressures from colleagues or your firm’s leadership? Or have you set just a few critical objectives—e.g., build trust and rapport, understand their issues, establish your credibility, and get a next step?

What specifically do you do to successfuly prepare for a meeting with a prospective client?

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Andrew Sobel helps companies and individuals build their clients for life. Andrew was a Senior Vice President and Country Chief Executive for Gemini Consulting (15 years). He is the co-author of the newly-released Power Questions as well as the author of the business bestsellers Clients for Life, Making Rain, and All for One. He can be reached at www.andrewsobel.com, where you can download a free set of Power Tools to help you get better at asking Power Questions.

The post How Well Do You Prepare for Your Client Sales Calls? appeared first on Big4.com.

Guest blog by Heather Townsend, co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life‘ and author of ‘FT Guide To Business Networking‘, and guest blogger for Big4.com:

Very often a firm will require it’s candidates for partnership to submit a personal business case as part of the admission process for new partners. This document isn’t something you can dash off at the weekend. So, in this post we are going to focus on what you need to do BEFORE you actually start writing your business case for partnership.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a lawyer, accountant or consultant, the actual writing of your personal business case for partnership is the last part of the process. Before this point, you will need to have done your homework.

Ideally as you start to write your business case the words will flow, based on many conversations with partners and extensive research into the market place and your firm. So, how long should you give yourself to research and write your business case? There is no hard and fast rule for this, but I would suggest you want to be starting to build your business case at least 18-24 months before you need to produce it.

Your law, consultancy or accountancy firm  is likely to have its own process for admitting partners to the partnership. Ask your HR director, HR business partner for your business unit, Head of Department, Mentor or Partner to find out what the process is. You may be lucky and find that your partnership either has a very informal process without the need for a business case, or a very simple process which is well documented, with a clear timeframe.

“The starting point is to understand the process and what the business case looks like and how the business case fits into the process.”

Darryn Hedges, Global Finance Director Marks and Clerk LLP

The next stage is to do your homework on the business and the marketplace in which your firm operates. Whilst you may have been in this firm for years, and are truly committed to it, you need to do your research with a detached and critical mindset. After all you could be spending a huge amount of your money to join this firm as a partner. If you were an external consultant advising your firm, what would you recommend to help them:

1. Strengthen the weaknesses in the partnership – be that technically, leadership, financially or commercially
2. Transition partners who are likely to retire in the near future
3. Help the partnership achieve it’s long term business goals and strategic objectives

To help you complete this work, take some time to speak to partners across your firm – in particular the key influencers in the partnership. This actually has a four-fold benefit to you. Firstly, you get to understand from the horse’s mouth what the partnership will be looking for in its new partners. Secondly, you alert them to your career intentions. Thirdly, you can get to know the people you will be running the firm with, if you are successful. (Do they energise you?) Finally, you can elicit their views as to where you would best fit into the partnership and the skills (technical or otherwise) you will need to develop to be in with a good chance of making the step up.

If you would like a free guide to writing your personal business case for partnership, click here (email required).

In summary…

You have 2 things to do before starting to write your personal business case for partnership:

1. Find out the process that your firm uses to admit new partners to the partnership
2. Do your homework and find out what the firm needs from its new partners

Author Credit

Heather Townsend helps professionals become the ‘Go To’ Expert. She is the author of the  award winning and best-selling book on business networking, the ‘FT Guide To Business Networking’ and the co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life’. Heather regularly blogs at How to make partner, Partnership Potential and Joined Up Networking

The post What to do BEFORE you write your business case for partnership appeared first on Big4.com.

Chiefs of Staff deliver substantial value to organizational effectiveness, particularly in an era of flat structures.    They enhance organizational operations and internal and external communications, and keep functions orderly and focused, allowing the CEO, Board and key executives to better focus on issues of strategic importance,  external and internal.

If established correctly and you hire the right person, this position can be a communications and operational focal point, organizer, coordinator, special project manager and organizational glue for an organization in continual flux with multiple and every changing work groups, changing priorities, and continuing marketplace challenges.  It’s also the type of position that becomes most valued after it has been vacated or eliminated, and the organization realizes that its work is no longer flowing smoothly and there is substantially more problems arising between organizational entities and work groups; also customers and with key external stakeholders.

For more on Chief of Staff duties, responsibilities and reporting relationships go to http://www.advancingyourorganization.com/?p=2271.

Michael VanBruaene was a KPMG Director and blogs at  Michael VanBruaene Performance Improvement Services – Advancing Your Organization (www.AdvancingYourOrganization.com). He can also be contacted at mvanbruaene@pacbell.net.

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Guest blog by Heather Townsend, co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life‘ and author of ‘FT Guide To Business Networking‘, and guest blogger for Big4.com:

It depends. I know that not really helpful. This is because every firm is different in it’s process for admitting new partners into the partnership. Some partnerships will have this formally written down, with a very structured approach for candidates for admission to the partnership. Other, often the small partnerships, will have a very informal process. However, each partnership will have a process for admitting new partners to the partnership.

Regardless of what your firm requires from you for a business case, it will typically have two parts. (Download your free guide to writing your business case here) The logical part which is written down, and the emotional part which isn’t written down. Yes, you did read that right, there is a part which isn’t written down! The logical part sets out how you meet the criteria for partnership. I.e. your track record and skills at developing new business, leading a team, contributing to managing the practice. It also shows how you being admitted to the partnership will help the partnership achieve it’s strategic objectives.

Remember that at this point your technical competence is taken as read. What your partners are really interested in now is the other stuff, i.e. your ability and appetite for winning work and growing your part of the practice, how well you lead others and work in a team etc

The emotional part of your business case is not written down. This is the part where your partners see you as a ‘good chap’, and trust that you will strengthen the partnership team, and be able to safely lead it into the future. If the emotional connection is not there, it doesn’t matter how good you are on paper, the Partners wouldn’t admit you to the partnership.

Author Credit

Heather Townsend helps professionals become the ‘Go To’ Expert. She is the author of the  award winning and best-selling book on business networking, the ‘FT Guide To Business Networking’ and the co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life’. Heather regularly blogs at How to make partner, Partnership Potential and Joined Up Networking

The post What needs to be written in your personal business case for partnership? appeared first on Big4.com.

It can be hard to tell your partners that you want to go for partnership. You don’t want to come across as pushy or arrogant, or speak out of turn. However, in my recent interviews with partners, and Jo Larbie, my co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life’, I learnt that your journey for partnership generally starts at the point you tell your partners that you want to go for partnership. In this blog post, we examine how to have that conversation with your partners.

We have experts strongly recommending that you tell your partners that you want to go for partnership. So, why do so many professionals recoil from the thought of doing this? I’ve heard people say things like this:

• that’s not the way it’s done in my firm
• it’s too early to think about going for partner
• I don’t want to come across as pushy or arrogant
• I’m worried they wouldn’t take me seriously
• I’m worried that they will tell me I’m not good enough
• I don’t want my peers (or partners) to think I’m getting ideas above my station

If you read through this, most of it is probably in your head. However, you may find this partnership potential self assessment tool (free download) handy to check whether you are probably seen to be partnership potential by your partners. If, after completing this tool, you find that you are probably not yet seen as partnership potential, my recommendation is to work on the gaps identified in the assessment for the next 3-6 months before having any conversation with your partner about wanting to become a partner.

Now, how to have that conversation? It’s probably not advisable to announce in a pub, slightly tipsy (or very tipsy) that you want to become a partner. Neither is telling a room full of your peers that you want to be a partner, the best way to have the conversation. Don’t even think about getting someone else to talk to your partner about your partnership prospects – are you a man/woman or mouse? If you are going to be a successful partner, you must be prepared to have a courageous conversation.

Here is how to have this conversation. Firstly, arrange to have a private conversation with the partner you work with most often, or the partner/director who has been allocated to you as a mentor. If you are asked for a reason for the meeting, say it’s about ‘how you are getting on in the firm (or something like that). In the meeting, after some chit-chat, ask the partner a couple of questions:

• how do they think you are performing?
• where could you be improving or strengthening your skill set ready for the future
• what do you think about my potential for progressing my career in this firm?
• what skills or capability would I need to gain if I wanted to make partner and this firm?

Questions such as these will underscore that you are keen and committed to progressing to partner – and will also naturally lead onto a natural conversation about whether you want to get to partner.

One word of warning. One of the best ways of having a career limiting conversation with your partners is to tell them you want to be a partner by a certain point in time. Partners normally hate this – they don’t like to be told that you are going to be a partner in the next 24 months…

What’s your experiences of having a conversation similar to this?

By Heather Townsend, Big4.com guest blogger, Heather is the co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life‘ and the author of ‘The FT Guide To Business Networking‘

The post How NOT to tell your partners you want to go for partnership appeared first on Big4.com.

Former CIA head and four-star general David Petreus is man of extraordinary accomplishments and service to his country. And so is General John Allen. But both their reputations have been diminished by their friendship with Jill Kelley in Tampa, Florida.

Who knows what truth will finally be revealed about this situation. But the press has reported some pretty unsavory but confirmed facts about Mrs. Kelley. Like, she tried to peddle her influence to a businessman trying to build a plant in South Korea, and wanted an $80 million commission. And she and her husband have been the subject of 9 legal actions against them in the last few years. Oh, and they apparently started a cancer charity that conveniently used up virtually all of the funds for travel and meals. The revelations keep coming. Yet she was awarded the nation’s second-highest civilian honor, a silver star, for “outstanding public service”—that is, basically hosting lavish parties at her house for top military officials.

Don’t get me wrong–I’m a huge supporter of our military service members, and in fact my son is in the Air Force. The point is that your fine reputation—which you have built up over years of hard work—can get clobbered if you associate with the wrong people. It’s the opposite of the psychological phenomenon called “positive association.” When a prospective client sees that we work with other people and companies they admire, they will be more trusting of us and more inclined to believe we’re competent. But as soon as we’re seen as associating with less-than-admirable characters, our own reputation takes a hit.

It can happen to almost anyone, and that’s why you have to be very, very careful about who you work and associate with. I remember I once interviewed a top executive for a research study I was doing. He invited me to do some consulting work for him and his well-known company. Before anything materialized—only weeks later—this executive was arrested in an FBI sting operation, found guilty, and jailed for a terrible crime. I saw him on TV in a jumpsuit and handcuffs. Seriously. And he had been recommended to me by a most trustworthy contact of mine.

Ask yourself: Do the clients I’m working for enhance my reputation or diminish it? Do I have relationships with individuals who may bring my own credibility into doubt for some reason?

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Andrew Sobel helps companies and individuals build their clients for life. Andrew was a Senior Vice President and Country Chief Executive for Gemini Consulting (15 years). He is the co-author of the newly-released Power Questions as well as the author of the business bestsellers Clients for Life, Making Rain, and All for One. He can be reached at www.andrewsobel.com, where you can download a free set of Power Tools to help you get better at asking Power Questions.

The post The Company You Keep: Does it Enhance or Diminish Your Reputation? appeared first on Big4.com.

During your first couple of meetings with a senior executive—someone who is a leader in their organization—you need to think carefully about the questions you ask. Don’t ask boring, general questions like “How’s business?” or “Can you tell me about your strategy?” With top executives in particular you need to add value for time. Prepare carefully so that yourquestions can be specific, not general. Politely challenge them. Ask questions that will help get at the root causes and help redefine the problem . Get underneath their thinking. What options are they considering? How are they going to make an important, upcoming decision?

Here are examples of the types of questions you should be using with organizational leaders:

1. Challenge a goal: “How did you arrive at 10% as a target? Do you feel that’s sufficiently ambitious?”
2. Ask about implementation: “How would you assess your progress in creating a more client-centric culture? What have you accomplished, and where are you lagging?”
3. Bring in internal insight: “In working with your people over the last six months, we observed a tendency towards risk avoidance, leading to slow decision making. Does that square with your own view? What do you think is behind that behavior?”
4. Ask about the external environment: “Why do you think (competitor x) has grown so rapidly in that market?” or “Some of your competitors have created virtual customer communities…do you have any initiatives in this area?”
5. Help redefine the problem: “In my experience, changing the organization structure won’t have the impact you want unless you also address things like your measurement and reward system and your decision making process. What do you think is really at the heart of lack of the lack of teamwork?”
6. Ask about organizational effectiveness: “How do you feel about the dynamics within your senior team?” or “As you think about your senior team, what skills or capabilities do you wish you had more off?”
7. Learn more about their thinking: “What do you think your options are to… (grow your European business…reduce your customer acquisition costs…improve your share of wallet…etc.)

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Andrew Sobel helps companies and individuals build their clients for life. Andrew was a Senior Vice President and Country Chief Executive for Gemini Consulting (15 years). He is the co-author of the newly-released Power Questions as well as the author of the business bestsellers Clients for Life, Making Rain, and All for One. He can be reached at www.andrewsobel.com, where you can download a free set of Power Tools to help you get better at asking Power Questions.

The post What Do You Say to the CEO? Questions for Top Executives appeared first on Big4.com.

By Richard Cornelisse, Big4.com Guest Blogger

Non-traditional competitors are entering the service provider market and capturing market share. Who are they? Can content service providers ignore these trends? Will technological innovation get an extra boost from this economic climate? What can we expect next? Is ‘Google’ the adviser of the future?

Market Strategy

If competitor benchmarking reveals that the traditional way of working is still successful and has growth potential, do you really need to change?

One answer might be that the scope of the benchmark exercise was too narrow, especially in cases where non-traditional competitors are targeting your market.

Is the impact of non-traditional competitors a realistic scenario?

The easiest way – without any further analysis – is simply to deny or ignore their existence. The obvious arguments include our strong brand name, our strong reputation and the strong position our company has achieved in the market traditionally. Companies have responded like this and subsequently gotten burned. Ignoring innovation, being too self-confident or underestimating technology developers is not a smart move.

What happens when you don’t ignore?

In the worst-case scenario, you can accept your position, reinvent yourself, set new strategic objectives and mobilize your company’s resources to realize new sources of income. The wrenching effect of the change is less extreme, of course, if the company adapts its strategy and is capable of spotting new opportunities and (re)positioning itself.

Internet, Search Engines And Social Media

Both Apple and Virgin entered new markets, captured market share and in some cases even market leadership.

Apple’s iTunes store is a good example. This store sells online music, applications (games and other third-party software) and books. With Apple TV you can purchase or rent movies and television series. Simply download, watch, listen and/or read on all your Apple devices.

Who stood to lose their longtime control over the market? The list is long but examples include: the (mobile) phone industry, music industry, gaming industry, printing industry, publishing, postal services, video rental industry, companies manufacturing DVDs/CDs, commercial radio and TV broadcasting, etc. In the Netherlands, the Free Record Shop is closing its megastore and many other stores have probably already done so or will follow. When somebody wins, somebody else must lose.

People can connect with each other all over the world and talk face-to-face (including video conferencing). This is all ‘free of charge’ if you have access to wifi (e.g. via FaceTime / Skype). This was traditionally the home market of telephone companies. Social media have made the world much smaller: you can establish global reach without any investment. With the infrastructure provided free of charge, you can connect with people, build and maintain networks, set up groups, communicate and share information. Many service providers had invested considerable amounts of money in similar sophisticated infrastructures over the years.

Companies such as Google, LinkedIn and Facebook are hardly charities. They use these services to achieve their own objectives: getting more users, increasing their advertisement income and gathering data for market analysis. Recently I noticed a tax organization that followed the same strategy. You could download an iPad app for free and get the latest edition of a digital book containing the local tax regulation as a bonus. In the past, that book was sold at market value. When somebody wins, somebody else must lose.

Many companies in the service provider industry sell content-based knowhow. In the past, that system was closed. Only a few organizations had access to specific content – often gathered via their worldwide network of people. At that time and under those circumstances, the content still represented significant added value for the client and therefore market value.

The system evolved from closed to open due to internet innovations such as search engines, and more people started to contribute and share content. Information can be posted, forwarded, shared and communicated. This is all free of charge: all kinds of content can be searched, found quickly and is available 24/7 as long as you have internet access.

Let’s do an exercise. Look back 5-10 years ago and think about the basic content that clients were willing to pay for and that content providers are now providing free of charge. Use Google’s search engine and enter that same question. What do you see? Google probably already has the answer to your question …

The consequence is that prices are going down and that the life cycle for this kind of paid product is at an end. Everybody can search and find it himself.

The current impact of Google and Wikipedia is already huge since, from a pricing perspective, much content has become less valuable or even worthless.

Will search engine functionality develop further? Will more content be available on the Internet?

Without doubt, the answer to both questions is a resounding yes.

Is ‘Google’ The Adviser Of The Future?

I am following the developments of Apple’s Siri of and of Google in general with great interest. Siri is the speech recognition engine that Apple uses as a virtual personal assistant for their devices. The software truly understands your questions, searches the web and provides you with answers immediately. Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has conceded that Siri could pose a “competitive threat” to the company’s core search business.

If that is the case, is it not realistic to assume that Google and/or other companies are going to invest a considerable amount of money in developing similar functionalities?

Such competition between these powerhouses will boost technology improvement.

Will such technology in the end truly understand all your technical questions? Is a virtual personal assistant going to respond immediately? Is this science fiction or our near future?

I am aware that some people will argue that certain knowhow depends on individual skill sets and expertise. For the moment, they are right, but they might be proven wrong in the future.

Can this also be automated?

What successful examples relate to strategic insight and decision-making? Chess is a strategic game and relates on fact-based information (pieces on the chess board: relevant facts) and a limited number of possibilities (moves: calculation of the impact of various options combined with overall strategic insight). If a chess-playing computer, Deep Blue, can beat world champion Gary Kasparov in a six-game match by two to one with three draws against, shouldn’t the automation of an adviser’s strategic decision-making also be possible?

Deep Blue’s successor – Watson – has beaten Jeopardy champions at their own game. What was needed to make that happen: “natural language processing, searching immense data sets and creating relationships among disparate sources of information to finally culminate in an answer.”

The good news is that the profession of service providing is a people business. We like to be connected to people. The success of social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace and all the dating sites has confirmed this as well. Maybe the statement about automating the adviser is a bit too provocative, but I still believe a lot more can be automated than we can currently comprehend.

Having an open mind is the message I want to get across. The only things that probably cannot be automated are our feelings and interactions.

That is why it is and will remain a people business.

Last but not least, I don’t pretend to write the strategy plan for Google. I just admire companies like Google, Apple and Virgin for their innovations and culture. In this blog “Google” represents companies that are technology innovators. The future adviser could therefore be somebody else.

The Change: A Different Way Of Working

In times of economic growth, there is a tendency to achieve increases in scale through acquisitions. In business services, the emergence of the Big4 is an example of this.

The economic recession causes companies to adjust to new market circumstances: demand decreases, fees come under pressure and employee productivity slides, causing the focus to shift to general cost savings and making downsizing necessary.

One complicating factor is that the traditional way of working and the way in which business services are offered are no longer relevant.

In times of recession, inefficiency becomes all the more visible when profits fall and there is no room for innovation. In addition, poor results have an adverse effect on the cooperation among disciplines: employees focus on self-preservation and not on existing or new forms of cooperation.

The tide can be shifted by reinventing oneself and by realizing behavioral changes among employees. The challenge is to change people who have been successful for years with their traditional way of working.

These are difficult and time-consuming processes that are possible only with close management and the involvement of the leaders. It is no chimera to consider a future involving significant offshoots and where the term Big4 ceases to exist.

The question has been asked more than once and is more relevant today than ever. Does the – relatively less profitable – auditing of financial statements and consultancy still fit under the umbrella of joint profit distribution? Not only does regulation lead to change, so do the personal motives of the stakeholders.

In times of continued economic recession, are people still willing to support each other financially when certain company components consistently underperform? Time will tell.

The founders of the KEY Group didn’t want to wait for this. Adjustment to changed circumstances and innovation is in our DNA. It is an essential component of the corporate image that we have in mind.

Change is not a threat but a challenge and it can’t happen quickly enough. Now is the moment to link up with new trends and markets.

We comprise a select group of people who share the same vision and we believe that the future lies in a “cloud” of collaborating experts in the areas of business control, information technology and indirect tax.

Richard Cornelisse is CEO of the KEY Group and worked previously as Big4 Partner in the Tax Performance Advisory and Indirect Tax Practice and blogs on Tax Function Effectiveness and Tax Control Framework developments.

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Our fast-paced, demanding schedules and the way we define success causes us to become stressed and remain in a stress state most of the time. This results in an anxious and emotional experience, which often leads us to react to what’s occurring in our environment — especially if something is happening that we don’t like.

Reacting has specific characteristics:

• it’s immediate, from an emotionally charged state
• it reflects habits that we’ve developed in our childhood
• it doesn’t allow for any thinking
• it doesn’t reflect our current level of experience and capacity to solve problems

In most, if not all cases, we regret what we say or do when we’ve done so from a reactive state of mind.

Responding, also has characteristics:

• it’s immediate (after practice), from a balanced emotional and logical frame of mind
• it includes thinking and considering all perspectives and outcomes
• it doesn’t reflect our current level of experience and capacity to solve problems.

In most cases, we feel good about the things we say or do when we’ve had time to reflect and consider all cases and so, responding produces better results.

For a personal growth opportunity: notice how much time you react or respond throughout a day and then shift that to move toward responding most of the time.

Here is a mind map for your handy reference:

Eleni Pallas was a management consultant with Deloitte in Europe, now an Executive Coach working with global leaders and teams.

The post Do you react at work? appeared first on Big4.com.

In times of economic growth, there is a tendency to achieve increases in scale through acquisitions. In business services, the emergence of the Big4 is an example of this.

The economic recession causes companies to adjust to new market circumstances: demand decreases, fees come under pressure and employee productivity slides, causing the focus to shift to general cost savings and making downsizing necessary.

One complicating factor is that the traditional way of working and the way in which business services are offered is no longer relevant. In times of recession, inefficiency becomes all the more visible when profits fall and there is no room for innovation.

In addition, poor results have an adverse effect on the cooperation among disciplines: employees focus on self-preservation and not on existing or new forms of cooperation.

The tide can be shifted by reinventing oneself and by realizing behavioral changes among employees. The challenge is to change people who have been successful with their traditional way of working for years.

These are difficult and time-consuming processes that are possible only with close management and the involvement of the leaders.

It is no chimera to consider a future involving significant offshoots and where the term Big4 ceases to exist.

The question has been asked more than once and is more relevant today than ever. Does the – relatively less profitable – auditing of financial statements and consultancy still fit under the umbrella of joint profit distribution?

Not only does regulation lead to change, so do the personal motives of the stakeholders. In times of continued economic recession, are people still willing to support each other financially when certain company components consistently underperform?

Time will tell.

Richard Cornelisse is CEO of the KEY Group and worked previously as Big4 Partner in the Tax Performance Advisory and Indirect Tax Practice and blogs on Tax Function Effectiveness and Tax Control Framework developments.

The post Business services: better results and higher quality using a different way of working appeared first on Big4.com.

Both negative as positive experiences (e.g. (the first and final) assessments, the amount of savings) would be something to register ongoing and communicate effectively within the organization. These are the benchmark findings of your own company and extremely useful for your strategy moving forward.

You need to know where you want to go and set up a roadmap how to get there. Benchmark against trends in the market might be supportive in your aim. It provides an overview of the experiences of others and is useful for setting own priorities going forward. It is always interesting to get insight of what others have experienced for own validation purposes.

Watch ‘Benchmark Findings’ Via YouTube

Overview of the ‘Key Risk Areas of VAT paid and VAT charged’ and ‘System Set Up’

Watch an overview of the ‘Key Risk Areas of VAT paid and VAT charged’ and ‘System Set Up and Process Errors’.

Watch ‘Key Risks’, ‘System Set Up And Process Errors’ via YouTube

This material might be useful for (internal) communication, risk analysis or self assessments:

• “The European Union VAT system – high level overview“
• “Why Manage Indirect Taxes“
• “Indirect Tax Exposures others have faced“
• “Audit Defense“
• “System for Dummies“
• “Surveys and research“

The post Trends And Benchmarking – ‘Get Some Objective Evidence’ appeared first on Big4.com.

I could easily be a dinosaur.

That’s because I earned my MBA in 1981 from Dartmouth’s Tuck School. I looked at the course catalog recently, and realized that I’m like the doctor who went to medical school before the invention of penicillin and the discovery of DNA. Most of what MBA students study today was not on the curriculum 32 years ago.

The point is this: the half life of knowledge is incredibly short, and what we learn in school is dwarfed by what we should and must learn outside of school. As so-called “educated” professionals, the ability to rapidly learn and flex our minds is the key to occupational longevity. We must be, as Einstein said to a friend, “passionately curious.” (OK, “learnest” isn’t a word, but it rhymes with “fittest”, and it gets the message across!)

Look no further than Leonardo for one of history’s most prolific and motivated learners.

In 1481, at the age of thirty, the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci left Florence in search of a patron or client. He drafted a letter offering his services to the Milanese ruler Ludovico Sforza: “I offer to execute, at your convenience, all of the items briefly noted below.” The extraordinary list consists almost entirely of descriptions of innovative military inventions that could be put at Sforza’s service. “I have a model of very strong but light bridges, extremely easy to carry. . . .  During a siege, I know how to dry up the water of the moats . . . I will make covered vehicles, safe and unassailable, which will penetrate enemy ranks . . .” and so on.  Interestingly, only at the very end of this letter does Leonardo mention putting his prodigious artistic talents to work for the Milanese leader.

Great client advisors have both depth and breadth, and Leonardo da Vinci was an example of a consummate deep generalist who was constantly learning new things. An illegitimate child who grew up in a small town in Tuscany, Leonardo had virtually no formal education. When he was brought to Florence and apprenticed at age 15, he knew nothing of Latin and probably could barely read. Although he lacked education, Leonardo rarely failed to master whatever discipline or task he set himself to.

While Leonardo was highly trained as a master artist, he branched out into many other disciplines. He constantly went to the source for his learning, studying the ripples in a pond with the same intensity he had for subjects of his paintings. He took nothing for granted, and constantly questioned why things were done a certain way, whether it was the traditional technique of applying paint to a canvas or the accepted way of swaddling newborn infants. When he painted the famous Last Supper, he completely broke with convention, and instead of placing Judas off to the side without a halo (the custom among Renaissance painters), he placed him close to Christ and on the right, differentiating him with nuances of expression and shadow.

At his death, he had become one of the most accomplished artists in history. He had designed hundreds of inventions, including a water-powered alarm clock, a parachute and a helicopter – all of them well before their time. Moreover, he created anatomical studies that were unequaled for nearly three hundred years. Leonardo was simply fascinated by everything around him, writing, “The desire to know is natural to good men.”

Leonardo da Vinci passed away nearly 500 years ago, but he’s still an inspirational role model for twenty-first century learners.

What are you doing this year to learn and grow? In which areas would you like to deepen your knowledge and skill? 

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Andrew Sobel helps companies and individuals build their clients for life. Andrew was a Senior Vice President and Country Chief Executive for Gemini Consulting (15 years). He is the co-author of the newly-released Power Questions as well as the author of the business bestsellers Clients for Life, Making Rain, and All for One. He can be reached at www.andrewsobel.com, where you can download a free set of Power Tools to help you get better at asking Power Questions.

The post Are You a Dinosaur? Survival of the Learnest appeared first on Big4.com.

To continue the discussion of directive leaders from the last leadership blog posting, I reference an article by Ben Austen in this month’s Wired magazine. The author outlines the leadership style of Steve Jobs, as well as the perspectives of those who supported and rejected him. We all know about Jobs – he claimed to be a Buddhist, but behaved with little respect for anyone. He was considered a technology design genius with a clear vision, yet unskilled in human relations. He created beautiful products, financial success, passionate customers, and at the same time, an organization ruled by fear and a family who never saw him.

When scanning the business world, it is hard to find many visible leaders who have created what Jobs’ finally did in his second round with Apple, especially the exuberant customers, but this could lead to the wrong conclusion. It would be a pity to think that such success can only come with an aggressive, directive leadership style. That style is the most commonly used because it requires the least skill, not because it produces the best results.

Many of Jobs’ supporters say that his clarity of vision and directive leadership style were the main reasons he could command respect and achieve excellence in all its detail. In fact, there is a distinction between vision, leadership style and outcomes. Most of the research coming out of top business schools says that all leaders need vision and those who can inspire people and create healthy, human work environments bring about the best results. The long-time leaders of companies such as Southwest Airlines, IKEA, Mary Kay and Best Buy use leadership styles that integrate sophisticated levels of emotional intelligence, while also building large financial empires and loyal customers. Their products are not as sexy as Apple’s and so, we forget to take their example…

Eleni Pallas was a management consultant with Deloitte, now an Executive Coach working with global leaders and teams.

The post Leading like Steve Jobs? appeared first on Big4.com.

Big4.com Guest Blogger

If you’re serving the wrong clients, you don’t have a chance for success.”  Bill Hermann, former Managing Partner, Plante & Moran

For professional service firms the client base, in effect, defines the business. Clients represent much more than a revenue stream: They are the magnet that attracts other desirable clients as well as top professionals to the firm. They help shape a firm’s brand and have a powerful influence on its reputation and standing in the marketplace.

In our research for my book, The Art of Managing Professional Services, we asked over 130 senior leaders to rate their firms on client portfolio management. Fifty-five percent of respondents gave themselves a top grade on performance in this area, as shown in the chart below. However, most indicated that they are good at individual client management – their weakness is in overall portfolio management and measurement.

Virtually all firms, whether global enterprises or niche players, allow for opportunistic client acquisitions. However, many believe they have erred too much in that direction and are far too ad hoc in their approach to acquiring clients, allowing partners to bring in new business at their discretion or reactively responding to pitch opportunities with little or no strategic planning. Traditionally, professionals have sought and served clients as part of their personal book of business – and this “lone ranger” mentality is alive and well throughout the professional service industry.

By nature, professionals like to own and protect their client relationships. They possess a natural reluctance to sever ties with clients, particularly those with whom they have long-term working relationships, no matter how unprofitable a fact-based assessment may reveal them to be. This reluctance often goes hand in hand with an unwillingness to conduct an objective profitability analysis.

A number of respondents observed that they have fallen prey to the Golden Goose syndrome: overreliance on a handful of clients who provide a major contribution to the firm’s revenues but who also result in dangerous vulnerability. We heard a number of sobering war stories about near disasters from firms that unexpectedly lost a key revenue-generating client. Everyone who runs a professional service firm understands the danger of keeping too many eggs in too few client baskets, but it is difficult not to be lulled into complacency when deep-pocket, long-term client assignments come your way. Small firms in particular tend to throw all hands on deck to manage these engagements, while long-term planning and business development to keep the new client pipeline active are put on hold.

Mastering the client management life cycle

Based on our discussions and experience in the industry, we have identified five steps to successfully manage the client cycle from concept through acquisition, retention, and renewal. The cycle begins with strategically determining and planning the client mix. As clients come onboard, they are carefully introduced into the firm and are nurtured and managed throughout the relationship via a well-defined process to sustain, grow, solicit feedback, and improve the client relationship. The cycle is completed with regular reviews of client profitability, partner management, and relationship status. Each step in the cycle is integral to building a profitable client base that sustains and nourishes the firm and its professionals.

1. Proactively strategize and plan“If you truly understand your clients, and you truly understand your mix within an industry or geography, you can more effectively manage the profitability of your portfolio.”  Rike Harrison, Chief Growth Officer, WipfliExpecting your business to grow opportunistically with no cohesive strategy underpinning individual efforts is rarely a recipe for success. Firms that adopt this approach run the risk of never gaining critical mass or reputation in any particular market. Leaders of the best run firms agree that the most effective way to maintain and build a strong client portfolio is to proactively plan and manage it. The process starts with an annual review of the entire client base. We have found the basic SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) to be a reliable tool for portfolio assessment. Start with the strengths – which clients are the most profitable, which provide the most promising opportunities for cross-selling or integrating additional firm services, and what type of client work offers the best platform to develop new services and skills?The next step is to pinpoint portfolio weaknesses. Most firms have some clients that don’t make sense from a variety of standpoints. Perhaps the most obvious is low profitability, but this can sometimes be justified if current work has the potential to lead to future, more lucrative engagements. Less obvious weaknesses are strategic and cultural mismatches. Too many pieces of business that are off target and out of sync with the firm’s traditional skill base can confuse the market, and use up a lot of senior time that could be better focused on strategic clients.In the next phase of the analysis, identify new business opportunities. Almost every professional service firm that we have consulted with has multiple opportunities to expand business with current clients. Time and again when we talk to clients of the firms we are working with, we uncover potential new business. And in fact, a significant number of our interviewees admitted that they do not do a good job of identifying the potential for growing current client relationships.Finally, a classic SWOT analysis can pinpoint inherent weaknesses in a client portfolio. Relying on too few clients creates dangerous vulnerabilities, but other threats also can seriously affect a firm’s profitability and positioning. It is always difficult to predict an economic meltdown, an unexpected merger or acquisition of a key client, or the departure of a partner with a large book of business, but top firms are fully aware of their vulnerabilities to these threats and make every effort to ensure that they are not caught off guard.

   Once the current client mix has been thoroughly reviewed and assessed, the next step is to create a vision of the ideal mix of clients that will drive the firm’s strategic direction while meshing with its values and culture. The most successful firms – both large and small – focus services around well-defined functional and industry areas of expertise. Industry is often the first screen applied to the profiling process, followed by determinations based on size, geographic dispersion, functional buyers, the competitive landscape, and an assortment of characteristics such as marquee value, emerging growth potential, level of innovation, and degree of distress.

2. Frame the client experience“Client relationship management is critical. You can take nothing for granted. It’s just like building a relationship with your spouse or your friends — you have to work at it.”  Ralph Baxter, Chairman and CEO, OrrickSavvy firms spend time discussing and documenting their philosophy and processes to create a client experience that exemplifies the firm’s work style, values, and culture. This is an inclusive process that involves partners across the firm in an evaluation of the factors that contribute to a successful client engagement, ranging from client early-stage needs, through the quality of interactions throughout a project, to follow-up activities to identify service strengths and weaknesses. Benchmarks and ROI metrics for determining client satisfaction and client service levels are captured and assessed frequently.Given the importance of clients in the life of a professional service firm, we are continually surprised and dismayed by the fact that so few firms have formal “welcome aboard” programs for new clients. Most firms rely on partners to introduce new clients to the firm. This casual approach works reasonably well for many of the firms studied because professionals typically don’t become partners if they can’t retain and expand client relationships. Yet many client managers readily admit that engagement start-ups can be rocky, both for the professional service team and its new client.An effective onboarding program creates positive expectations, builds familiarity and trust, and demonstrates value to a client early on with the goal of transforming an initial engagement into a long-term relationship. The best-led PSFs use a carefully selected mix of onboarding approaches that go well beyond standard “let’s get acquainted” letters and meetings. They view the initial honeymoon phase as the launchpad for a carefully orchestrated relationship-building strategy (For more onboarding practices listen to Four Tips for Bringing in New Clients).
3. Sustain and grow accounts“Every client has a coordinating partner responsible for overseeing the delivery of services and managing the client relationship.”Firms strongly committed to developing a comprehensive client strategy recognize that someone must be responsible for developing and monitoring every aspect of an integrated client program. Although top management owns the overall strategy, responsibility cascades to business unit leaders and individual partners and professionals to manage and monitor client relationships, solicit feedback, and review and measure progress.Forward-thinking firms have a detailed plan for each of their high-performing clients — that 20 percent or so of their client base that typically provides most of their business. The primary goal is to build a framework for a consistent, client management plan aimed at cultivating optimal clients. A good client plan features a clearly delineated profile of client resources and service needs, includes a service progression map built around a revenue strategy, and has a tracking process and benchmarks for measuring progress against objectives. In a formal client plan, roles and responsibilities are clearly laid out. Client ownership is well defined — not just from a service perspective, but in terms of accountability for expanding the client relationship and generating additional business (see below: Client Management at Ernst & Young).
4. Solicit client feedback“Clearly, getting feedback from your clients is like gold dust. It’s of immense value.”In the best-run firms, client opinions and recommendations are an integral part of service testing and innovation, structure and process improvements, and relationship management. Clients are contacted to solicit their viewpoints formally in periodic surveys or informally during regular engagement interactions. Some firms pilot new offerings and service delivery concepts with key clients to test-run ideas and deepen their commitment to and involvement with the firm.The most common feedback tool is some form of survey, whether face to face or online. Many years of conducting interviews both in person and via telephone have given us a bias toward having conversations rather than relying entirely on an online survey. However, some firms use online surveys as a first step, with in-person or phone conversations as a second-level vehicle if the initial online survey uncovers less-than-satisfactory results.A number of firms across the industry have well-defined and well-executed programs to regularly obtain feedback and mine it for relationship-building data. Some rely on their leadership team and staff to spearhead the feedback process, and others use third-party interviewers. Most who survey their clients do so annually.
5. Review results, establish rewards and accountability“We don’t trust our data on client profitability. We’re working toward it. I’d say we do it well enough to be directional. We’re continually pushing to make our systems better”By far the most politically challenging stage in client life cycle management is assessing and fine-tuning performance. This involves reviewing client service results, taking definitive action based on feedback and financials, and rewarding good performance and mitigating average or poor performance. In general, firms review and measure performance across three dimensions: Are the clients happy? Are the partners doing a good job? Is the firm making any money?Client feedback programs provide input on relationship status, problem areas and needed service improvements. Some firms tie feedback results into personnel evaluations and flag areas for improvement, and others, with formal client plans, review plan goals against performance which in turn links to compensation. And some firms — not enough in our opinion — conduct formal profitability reviews of each client and actually terminate unprofitable relationships.Technology is markedly improving data gathering in this area. Dashboards, that offer real-time reporting, highlight the impact of increased profitability on effective portfolio management and spotlight the negative effects of low-return clients on the firm’s bottom line.

Client Management at Ernst & Young

According to Jim Turley, Chairman of Ernst & Young Global, “At EY, the client is the center of the universe.” As a major global PSF, the organization’s client base is large and diverse with a wide spectrum of needs. To deliver consistent service across the portfolio, EY adopted a multi-level, account-centric client approach to service delivery:

• Account segments: The organization strategically classifies its clients into several categories based on the size and service needs of the client. The objective is to calibrate service levels to client needs or as Turley explains, “to better serve clients where and how they need to be served.” Major multinational clients, for example, require seamless service across the globe from a well-coordinated account team, while an emerging growth client needs hands-on attention from a team which is familiar with the needs of fast growing companies. The segmentation helps EY deliver the types of services required for each client. EY reviews the segment distribution on an annual basis and makes adjustments based on changing client needs.
• Coordinating partner: Every client has a coordinating partner (CP) who is responsible for overseeing the delivery of services and managing the overall client relationship. The CPs are selected based on their specific skill sets and usually reside in close geographic proximity to the client — account teams for multinational companies are typically led by a partner based at the company headquarters. For the largest accounts the CPs are required to develop an annual client plan to address the service needs of the client and deepen the relationship. Account plans are reviewed and approved by senior leadership and are monitored regularly for service quality and staffing consistency.
• Assessment of service quality (ASQ): EY monitors client satisfaction throughout the year through a formal and rigorous process called ASQ which is executed locally and monitored at the global level. A person independent of the account team meets with a number of senior executives — including the audit committee, board members and senior management — to assess the relationship status. The ASQ leader files a written report and any risk areas are promptly communicated to the CP and quickly addressed. For the firm’s largest accounts, the reviews are conducted annually; other accounts are reviewed on a rotating basis.

Turley emphasizes that, to grow the business, EY is looking for profitable work with clients it can serve in a quality way. The client management program supports this goal and creates a win-win situation for both the organization and its clients.

Maureen Broderick is founder and CEO of Broderick & Company (www.broderickco.com), a consulting firm specializing in strategy, training, and research for professional services. Her new book, The Art of Managing Professional Services: Insights from Leaders of the World’s Top Firms was published in November 2010 by Wharton School Publishing.

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If you want to have a seat at the table, you must be seen as contributing directly to your clients’ growth and profits. If this is the case, they will never get enough of you. But if you’re viewed as a cost—a necessary evil, like buying gas for your car—they will cut you anytime.

Over the last decade, I’ve studied several hundred long-term client relationships built by leading service firms in a variety of sectors. While there are many common denominators across these trusted partnerships, probably one stands out: In almost every case, the service provider is viewed as directly supporting the client’s most important goals for growth, profitability, and innovation.

A good example of this principle is the financial audit of public companies that is required by law. The best audit partners at the large accounting firms are able to position their audit services as far more than just fulfilling a statutory requirement. In these relationships, the audit firm is also helping the client to identify and reduce risk, improve their financial management practices, built a great internal team of finance professionals, improve operational performance, and so on. In other cases, I have seen the audit reduced to a fungible commodity that is purchased purely on the basis of having the lowest price. And when another audit firm offers to do it even more cheaply, the client is happy to switch with no compunction whatsoever!

Do your clients view you as supporting their most important goals? Are you part of their growth and profits? Can you tie your work directly to these things, and show the value of what you’re doing? Or are you a kind of necessary evil, an expense that they have to begrudgingly incur—sort of like when you buy gasoline for your car?

This principle lies at the heart of the difference between a trusted advisor and a mere vendor.

How to put this principle into practice

Here are 5 strategies that will help you position yourself as supporting a client’s growth and profitability:

1. Move up in the organization. Senior line executives are responsible for both revenue and profits; and top functional executives (e.g., the head of HR) usually feel a direct link to these same goals. Mid-level staff executives have cost budgets, however, and are more likely to focus on expense control and be highly price sensitive.

2. Be an agenda setter. Invest time to understand your client’s agenda—their highest-level goals and key priorities. Help to shape and improve the agenda. Show how your work supports the agenda. Demonstrate thought leadership around the agenda.

3. Always ask “Why?” When a client says, “We want to do a two-day training program. How much will that cost?” you risk sub-optimizing the engagement if you immediately agree to explore that option. Instead, you should ask “Why do you want to do that?”—even four or five times—to try and uncover the high-level goal that is driving the perceived need for a training program.

4. Broaden your conversations. If all of your conversations with your client are about the immediate project, you’ll never establish your credibility to discuss their broader business issues. When the breadth of your conversations increases, so to will the breadth of the relationship.

5. Quantify value early on. For any and every engagement, you must explicitly discuss with the client the value which will be created. When you get the client to articulate about how a particular initiative will affect costs, efficiency, retention, risk, revenues, and so on, you begin to connect it to growth and profit goals.

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Andrew Sobel helps companies and individuals build their clients for life. Andrew was a Senior Vice President and Country Chief Executive for Gemini Consulting (15 years). He is the co-author of the newly-released Power Questions as well as the author of the business bestsellers Clients for Life, Making Rain, and All for One. He can be reached at www.andrewsobel.com, where you can download a free set of Power Tools to help you get better at asking Power Questions.

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By Tim Reed, Big4.com Guest Blogger

You’ve just walked out of an operations review, only to hear that another project has not delivered as expected. The team lead had been called on the carpet, having to explain what has gone wrong with deployment and what actions are going to be taken.  The team lead has just completed a lackluster review of the project’s current status and most of the meeting was a critique of actions taken and the directive to fix the current problems and then report back to leadership.  You have now witnessed so many of these meetings, that aside from the specific crisis at hand, you have the gut feeling that ‘there has to be a better way’!

It is likely that your  team and organization has become overwhelmed and  too focused on remediating  current issues. The same issues continue, happen repeatedly  and the result is that there is little or no change to the conditions that created the problems in the first place.

There is a better way and a solution. I’m calling it “Precision Transformation’ .  My definition of Precision Transformation includes the specific activities, metrics, measures and change management required to deliver results with precision.

My premise is that although IT organizations are well known for gearing up a project plan and project team to deliver a solution, there is limited focus on delivering with precision. Given the complexity of delivering results, the focus needs to change.

Driving precision transformation will change IT delivery, whether it is in the execution of the software delivery life cycle or  in IT operations.  To make this happen consider the following:

Defining Need : Are your customers able to accurately describe what is needed ?  (This goes beyond the classic use of business analysts to refine customer requirements)  If the customer cannot define the need with some level of detail, then why are we doing the project to begin with ?  Three simple questions to ask when defining the need include: 1)  Is the need defined in detail  ?  2) What is the expected impact to the end customer ?  3) What will this new functionality do to  current state operations ?

Quick Hint: If you cannot define the need with some detail, then why are you doing the project ?

Defining Delivery:  Ask your customer to close their eyes and define the perfect delivery..aka ‘nirvana’.  3 simple questions to ask include: 1) What does best in class delivery of the solution look like ?  2) What does delivery look like for operations and IT ? 3) What would be their worst nightmare …things that could go wrong ?

Quick  Hint: If the customer cannot answer all of these questions, then go back to the drawing board !

Defining Operations :  Pull out your current documented operational and IT models, all the metrics, all the reporting and examples of  the operational reports that are created today.  Or if you don’t want to collect this data, draw it on the white board.  Ask you team these three simple questions: 1) What are we going to eliminate / improve / change with the rollout of the new initiative ?  2) What is the impact to our architecture and infrastructure when rollout happens ? 3) What steps were taken throughout each phase of the SDLC to make sure operations are going to be robust ?

Quick Hint:  Ask these questions as the start of project and ask them at the end !

Tim Reed, CEO at ReedITC worked at E&Y , focusing on Global Fortune 50 Firms. ReedITC is a strategic IT & Operations consulting firm focused on Cost (Ability to operate efficiently at scale ), Growth (Ability to drive top line growth) and Compliance (Ability to provide services securely). For more information, please visit www.reeditc.com or contact tim.reed@reeditc.com

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Directive leadership style_Big Four Blog_16 July 2012

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Enthusiasm is contagious! Think about the most enjoyable and memorable professors you had in college. More likely than not, they possessed unbridled enthusiasm for their subject. Whether it was Art 101 or Political Science, they drew you in. They captivated your attention and interest.

The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek enthousiasmós. It means, literally, “possession by a god” or “having a god within.” Doesn’t that say it all? When you are truly enthusiastic about what you do, you have such excitement, zeal, ardor, and passion that it’s as if you are possessed!

Whether you’re dealing with a client or your boss, or you’re in a job interview, it’s essential to have enthusiasm. It lights up the room. It draws people to you. It wins them over to your cause.

On the flip side, how would you feel if you were about to have brain surgery, and just before putting you under the neurosurgeon says “You know, I’m getting tired of surgery…I’m thinking about going into real estate.” I don’t know about you, but I would shout “Stop!” and find another doctor!

Strengthening your enthusiasm

1. Make sure you’re in the right profession. Would you say you (1) Love your work; (2) Neither particularly like nor dislike your work; or (3) Don’t really enjoy what you do? Sure, we all have to earn a living somehow, but there are hundreds of ways to do that. If you’re not waking up in the morning excited about your work, you need to think hard about why that’s the case.

2. Make sure you’re in the right job. Again, rate your enthusiasm for your job using the 1-3 scale, above: Do you (1) Love your job—i.e., your current role; (2) Neither particularly like nor dislike this specific job; or (3) Don’t really enjoy this job?

3. Give yourself new challenges. Sometimes, we work in an avocation for many years and it can become routine. Develop a new sub-specialty, get a new role in your organization, or do something else to reinvigorate your enthusiasm for your work.

4. Be enthusiastic about other people’s ideas and plans. My own tendency, when someone shares an idea with me, is start assessing how original the idea is and what the risks are. Not good! Get excited about someone’s proposal before you start criticizing it.

5. Work on your gratitude. When we’re feeling grateful, it’s much easier to become excited and fervent about what we do.

What are you most enthusiastic about in your work right now? In your life?

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Andrew Sobel helps companies and individuals build their clients for life. Andrew was a Senior Vice President and Country Chief Executive for Gemini Consulting (15 years). He is the co-author of the newly-released Power Questions as well as the author of the business bestsellers Clients for Life, Making Rain, and All for One. He can be reached at www.andrewsobel.com, where you can download a free set of Power Tools to help you get better at asking Power Questions.

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Do you ever find that you are slogging through meeting after meeting with a prospect, month after month, without reaching a sale? You have lots of conversations, but there is no forward progress. In today’s economy, there are in fact lots of sales conversations that go on and on without ever arriving anywhere. You can avoid this by asking a series of incisive questions that help you verify if the preconditions for a sale are present.

The first precondition for a sale is that there must be a significant perceived problem or opportunity. If there isn’t, why would anyone hire you?

To ascertain whether a truly significant problem or opportunity exists, you should ask questions like: “What is this costing you right now?”; “If you don’t fix this problem, what will the consequences be?”; “What do you think this opportunity is worth to your organization?”; “What other issues is this causing for you?”; “Would you say this is one of your top two or three priorities?” And so on.

A second precondition is that you must be speaking to someone who owns the problem and is empowered by their organization to fix it. In big companies, there are always lots of problems—and plenty of people willing to talk about them. But unless you are talking to the owner of the issue, that’s all you’ll do—talk. Questions you can use here might include: “Who owns this problem?”; “Are you responsible for fixing this?”; “Who would authorize an expenditure to address this?”;  “Who needs to be involved in the solution?”; and “Who would lead the implementation of a solution?”

A third precondition is that the buyer must have a healthy dissatisfaction with the current rate of change or improvement. The client may have a problem, and it may be significant—but they will not bring on a new service provider or supplier unless they are unhappy with progress or current solutions. Questions that can help to ascertain this would include: “Would you say this is a minor irritant, at one end of the scale, or something you’re truly fed up with, at the other end?”; “Why do you feel that now is the time to put extra resources against this?”; “What solutions have been tried already?”; and  “How effective have your own efforts been to address this? Why or why not?” (Remember–if there have been no internal efforts launched to address the issue, how important can it really be?).

A fourth precondition is that the client must trust you are the best resource for the job—better than your competitors and better than internal efforts. How do you determine this? This is harder than the other preconditions, because it’s difficult to ask someone point-blank if they trust you! More likely, you’ll sense a hesitation or reluctance. Nonetheless, you can questions such as “What other solutions are you looking at?”; “How do you view our capabilities in this area?”; “How do you see your alternatives right now?”; and, “What concerns do you have about us or our approach?”

Lastly: A sale will get stalled if all the right stakeholders have not been aligned. The first four conditions may have been met, but if there are key influencers or important constituencies who are not on board with hiring you, your client won’t become a buyer. To ascertain this, you need to ask questions about the decision-making process. For example: “Who needs to be involved in making this decision?” “What key stakeholders in your organization need to sign off on this?” and “With other clients, I’ve found that an important initiative like this rarely gets off the ground without the support of multiple constituencies. In your organization who would these be?”

The prospect you are talking to may have had ten other meetings on the same day. If you want to be memorable, be bold about asking incisive, thought-provoking questions that demonstrate you’re a peer and help you ascertain if the client is truly ready to buy.

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Andrew Sobel helps companies and individuals build their clients for life. Andrew was a Senior Vice President and Country Chief Executive for Gemini Consulting (15 years). He is the co-author of the newly-released Power Questions as well as the author of the business bestsellers Clients for Life, Making Rain, and All for One. He can be reached at www.andrewsobel.com, where you can download a free set of Power Tools to help you get better at asking Power Questions.

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The growth of online education programs opens learning opportunities to busy Big 4 professionals. Veterans of the Big 4 are not strangers to online learning; the major firms have offered targeted e-learning classes for years, focusing on the specific skills and competencies needed to enhance service delivery. But, degree programs have been elusive.

In online degree programs, students use a learning portal to register for classes, access study materials and interact with their professors. E-books, articles and streaming media form the backbone of study, supporting the completion of written assignments. Timed online examinations verify a student’s mastery of course materials, and they can be completed form any location (as long as internet access is available).

Many programs are asynchronous; you can complete the coursework at your own pace without having to set foot in a classroom at a particular time every week. Client commitments, therefore, will not force you to choose between work and school. You can take a break for busy season if you work in the tax practice, and you can defer your assignments until after the client goes “”live”" if you are a consultant. As you complete assignments, you submit them to professors for evaluation and grading – regardless of where you are located. The time you spend on a plane can become productive, giving you a chance to make progress toward a Masters or Doctorate that is relevant to your line of work.

A number of programs based in the United States and abroad have distinguished themselves in the field of distance learning. In the United States, Suffolk University has developed a unique program that grants the same degree as the classroom-based business program. With Suffolk’s online program, students log into a chat room for class every week instead of appearing for classes in person. Students interested in an online doctoral program can look to the University of Maryland University College. A pioneer in the field of distance learning, UMUC has delivered correspondence (and later online) courses since 1947.

A global alternative can be found in Switzerland, where the International Institute of Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne and Swiss Management Center (SMC) have developed leading global business programs, distinguishing themselves through innovative delivery and teaching methodologies. SMC offers flexible online Masters and Doctorate programs to students from more than 60 countries.

Based in Vevey, SMC exemplifies the effectiveness of the online education model. SMC offers a solution to the Big 4 road warrior’s continuing education dilemma, with a flexible distance learning program and asynchronous study model. SMC uses a web-based learning management system to connect students and professionals across borders without the need for a central physical meeting place. With business administration and finance programs through the doctoral level, even busy Big 4 employers can continue their educations and advance their careers.

The Big 4 emphasize the importance of ongoing learning, but the nature of a Big 4 career can block access to advanced degree programs. SMC’s asynchronous distance learning programs can help you advance your education and career whether you are in the office or at the departure gate. “

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