One of the corner stones of any professional’s referral marketing strategy needs to be relationships with professional introducers – particularly if you have an advisory specialism, such as insolvency. After all, the more people who can be passing you referrals for you, the greater your reach and influence.

However, it can become all too easy to gather too many relationships with introducers, which harm your ability to generate referrals. In this second part of this 2-part blog post, I explore the downsides of one-too-many relationships with introducers, and how to decide which ones to keep and which ones to ditch. (1st part here)

How to decide on which introducer relationship to keep and which to ditch?

This is a difficult question, because, very often, many of the seven essential ingredients are present in a relationship. (Probably, part of the reason you decided to send referrals to each other in the first place.) However, it will be the missing ingredients which will hold the clue to which relationships to stick with.

I was talking with one of my new professional introducer relationships last week, trying to work out when to send him work and when to bring in his known, respected and trusted competitor. They both, on the surface of it, offered the same skill set. When we talked this through, actually, we realised that the question would resolve itself over time. Over time, one relationship would develop faster and stronger than the other. This could be because we are working together on mutual clients more often, or because we are socialising together more often. However as a result, this will be the person who I will refer in more and more as time goes by.

At this point in time, do we know which relationship will win out? Not at the moment. More importantly, that’s OK – as long as I am honest and open with both parties, then the question will resolve itself over time. Of course, I could keep on both introducer relationships, and between the three of us we could grow the size of the pie bigger for all of us. For me, that’s the ideal scenario. But, for you and your client portfolio, that may not be realistic.

To help you think about the right relationships to have with introducers, download, from our career kitbag, our free step-by-step guide to building your personal relationship strategy. 

What should you do now?

Before you start ditching or starting new introducer relationships, take a moment to reflect. Who in your network have you either a formal or informal referral agreement with?

Go down your list and rank each person for the 7 ingredients we talked about in the 1st part of this article. You may like to ‘weight’ the ingredients. You may find that opportunity is more important to you than friendship. Then answer these questions:

• Who is your most important relationship? What do you need to do to make it even more effective?
• What is your least effective relationship? Do you ditch or focus on making it effective?
• Are any of your relationships bringing you into conflict? If so, what can you do to reduce the tensions?
• If you needed to increase your chargeable time, which relationship would you spend less time with, as it wouldn’t impact your business development in the short, medium or long term?

To help you think about the right relationships to have with introducers, download, from our career kitbag, our free step-by-step guide to building your personal relationship strategy. 

How do you decide on the professional introducer relationships you will forge? 

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 Can you have too many relationships with introducers? (part 2) appeared first on Big4.com.

One of the corner stones of any professional’s referral marketing strategy needs to be relationships with professional introducers – particularly if you have an advisory specialism, such as insolvency. After all, the more people who can be passing you referrals for you, the greater your reach and influence.

However, it can become all too easy to gather too many relationships with introducers, which harm your ability to generate referrals. In this 2-part blog post, I explore the downsides of one-too-many relationships with introducers, and how to decide which ones to keep and which ones to ditch.

Why is having too many relationships with introducers a bad thing for your business and time?

Before we go any further, let’s examine why having too many relationships with introducers is a bad thing for you and your business. Or should I say, you and your focus?

Firstly, strong relationships with introducers take time to build. They don’t happen overnight or by magic. Any decent relationship with an introducer is based on seven things:

• trust
• friendship
• opportunity
• credibility
• regular communication
• shared goals
• business and personal values alignment

To build up the trust, credibility and friendship takes time. Time which you often don’t have. The time that you are talking, meeting, doing things for each other, is time which you could be billing your clients. In effect, until you have started to generate business from the relationship, everything you do before that point is investment. There is no guarantee that the investment in the relationship which pay off in the long term. Therefore, the more relationships with introducers you are juggling, the less time you have to actually focus on working with your clients and finding opportunities to work with more clients.

There is also another reason why you don’t want too many relationships with introducers. Very often referral relationship works in the long-term because each of you knows that the other sends you work. However, if you know that the person you send work to is also sending it to your competitors, it can be a sticking point. Not just a small sticking point, but a big, whopping, sore point. The sort of sore which can niggle at the relationship glue, and eventually, break it down. Therefore, you have to be very careful that you are not, to use an analogy, ‘putting it about a bit too much’ with your relationships with introducers. A little like dating, you could say.

To help you think about the right relationships to have with introducers, download, from our career kitbag, our free step-by-step guide to building your personal relationship strategy. 

In my next blog post on the Big4.com, I will look at what to do when you have one relationship too many with an introducer.

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 Can you have too many relationships with introducers? (part 1) appeared first on Big4.com.

Getting back in touch with people and old colleagues is something that many of us find difficult. Regardless of whether your motive is driven by a commercial need or you are just curious, it doesn’t make it any easier to get back in touch. However, for most of us, there is a huge amount of benefit of getting back in touch with our university friends and people we trained with. Why? These people are probably now in a position of influence. Who better to help them, then their old drinking buddy?

This article gives you some tips on how to successfully get back in touch with people you have lost touch with

1. Just do it

That’s right. Just do it. After all, what’s the worse that can happen? They don’t return your call? This is a scenario where it is nothing venture, nothing gained.

2. Use LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great place to find people who you used to work with or go to school with. (That’s if you can remember their full name!) You will find that most professionals will maintain some kind of presence on LinkedIn. Your best bet, after checking their profile, is to send them a request to connect, with something similar to this:

“Hello James,

I hope you don’t mind me contacting you but I came across your LinkedIn profile. It was a real blast from the past. Is it really x years since we were at xxx together? It would be lovely to catch up over a drink to find out how you are doing. Let me know…”

3. Work out your reasons for getting back in touch

Now your reasons for getting back in touch could be many and varied. However, the more aware of your motivation for getting back in touch, the more likely it will happen. If you do want something from them, then hold off with your requests until you have re-established the relationship on a stronger footing.

To help you work out your reasons for getting in touch, we recommend that you download from our free Career Kitbag, your free guide to building your personal networking strategy.

4. Find them on Facebook

Very often the person you want to get back in touch with will be in contact with some mutual contacts – potentially on Facebook. You may find that a search on Facebook is the quickest way to find an old friend or colleague.

5. Keep the first contact very ‘light’

When you are re-establishing contact, keep it very light touch. Don’t instantly assume that the other person will become your best buddy overnight again. Ideally the tone of your first communication – whether by email or social media, ideally needs to be warm, open and friendly. Can you recall any shared experiences to use on your first communication, particularly if they were of very happy or successful times?

6. Pique their curiosity

Your aim is to quickly get the communication flowing between the two of you. Therefore, don’t write war and peace with this first communication. As I said before, keep it light, and offer an incentive to have a phone call. For example:

“It would be great to have a phone call to properly update each other on what’s happened since we last talked! You may be surprised at some of what I have been up to”

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 6 tips to get back in touch with an old colleague appeared first on Big4.com.

Chasing down clients who never decide to buy from you wastes your precious time (and other’s in your team). Therefore, you need to qualify every lead before you commit the firm’s resources to converting the lead to a client. In our career kitbag is a free step-by-step guide to writing your marketing plan, which will help you save time in qualifying your leads by attracting more of the right sort of clients in the first place. When you are pre-qualifying a lead, and before you spend large amounts of time writing a proposal, you need to be find out 4 things:

• Budget
• Decision maker
• Fit
• Urgency

Budget

As early in the sales process as possible you want to ascertain that the prospect has the financial capacity or access to the funds to buy from you. If they state that they don’t have a budget for your services, this may not be a ‘game over’ sign, but indicates that you will need to decide whether you want to educate them as to the value of your services. In an early conversation with a prospect it often helps to let them know what your services are likely to cost. In this early conversation, try not to be too prescriptive with your fees, but let your prospective know the likely range of fees that they may need to fork out for.

For example:

[quote]“Clients with problems similar to yourself typically find that it will cost them between £5000 and £30000 for my assistance to solve these problems”[/quote]

Decision maker

Very often the person who enquires about using you may not be the ultimate decision maker. Whilst they may seem to have the right title to take the decision, it may not always be the case. For example, when we sign up clients who are sole practitioners or aspiring partners who decide to pay for our services from their personal funds, we often find that they need the approval of their spouse before committing to work with us. As much as possible you need to be talking to the individuals who are the budget holder, and have the authority to allocate funds. When you are talking with a prospect you will need to investigate who else may need to be involved to hire you.

Fit

Not every client and professional advisor is a match made in heaven. Many a professional has become a cropper on an assignment or lead due to a lack of rapport between them and the client. As well as a good level of rapport, you need to make sure that the prospect has specific needs that you can solve. When you first speak to them, these needs may not be easily visible. In fact, the initial ‘presenting problem’, is often not what, after some investigation, what you end up solving. For example, we were initially asked whether we could help a large accountancy firm with some confidence and body language training. (not what we do!) After just one short email exchange with the prospect, this turned into strategic networking training for their fee earners. However, you have to determine whether your potential client is truly interested to learn what is possible as a result of using your services, and is motivated to achieve this.

Urgency

When someone buys a professional service this normally represents a considered purchase. I.e. there is normally a high level of risk (be it money or reputation) if as a result of using your services; the desired end result is not achieved. Therefore, before you allocate a large proportion of time to developing a piece of business, you need to make sure that the prospect intends to make a purchase and has a specific timeframe for doing so.

In our career kitbag is a free step-by-step guide to writing your marketing plan, which will help you save time in qualifying your leads by attracting more of the right sort of clients in the first place. 

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 4 ways to qualify a lead appeared first on Big4.com.

You get to a certain point in your career and your career progression depends on your building up your own client portfolio. Not winning more work from your partner’s clients, but winning your own client. In fact, we have recently spoken to a senior accountant and a senior consultant who had reached the ceiling for their career. What was going to take them to the dizzy heights of partnership (whether salaried or equity), was winning their own clients. This was the advice we gave them:

What are you going to be famous for? Or what will your thing be?

Decide on what you are going to become famous for? If I do a quick internet search for you, I should be able to find you on LinkedIn and see easily what you are a specialist in. If I can’t find you, then your potential clients can’t find you either. They will want to check out your credibility independently of your firm on-line.

Within the Career Kitbag you will find a guide to choosing and leveraging your niche. Read this guide, and this will help you find your ‘thing’. Look around your firm, where are their areas of growing specialisation, or other fee earners growing out of their specialism? For example, when I interviewed Carl Reader, Partner at Dennis & Turnbull, for ‘The Go-To-Expert: How to be recognised, valued, booked and in demand for doing what you love’, he told me that he had initially built up a specialism for martial arts clubs. A partner in his firm had a portfolio of 30 clients, and he worked with this partner to become the firm’s and marketplace expert for martial arts clubs. Over time he then broadened his specialism from martial arts clubs to franchising.

Build your profile and visibility for ‘your thing’

Once you have decided on your thing, you need to build a footprint and reputation for your thing. Until you have some real clients you are working on for ‘your thing’, you are going to need to research, talk and write about ‘your thing’. This will help you to build your profile and visibility with the clients and intermediaries that could give you work. This is going to be a large amount of spade work on your part. (This was the route I followed to become know as the business networking expert for professional service firms)

This will involve branding yourself for your ‘thing’ (and committing to this), in addition to writing and commenting about ‘your thing’. At this stage, it doesn’t matter if your thing is quite a narrow technical speciality and/or audience you do it for. (Remember Carl started with a tiny niche, martial arts clubs.) You can expand your focus later.

To help you plan how to build your profile and visibility download the marketing plan and associated activities, plus guide to content planning, from the Career Kitbag to help you think through what to write about, what content to share, which social media channels to share it across etc

Only once your have built up a ‘brand’ and ‘profile’ for your thing will you get to the point where clients may come to you for some help.

Leverage off others to quickly build your credibility and get a foot in the door

Your own credibility is going to take time to build. One way of taking some short cuts is to work with someone in the industry who has bucket loads of credibility. This could be someone in your firm or someone in your network with a complementary skill set.

Realistic timescales

Rome wasn’t built in a day – and the same can be said for your reputation and profile. If you work hard at building your reputation and profile, it is realistic to expect that you should see some reward for your labours within 6-12 months.

What are your tips for winning your first client?

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 5 things you must do to win your first client. 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.

Writing proposals which go absolutely nowhere is not just gutting, but a huge waste of time. So, how do you make sure that you are writing proposals for the right piece of work?

Here are my thoughts….

1. Test out their commitment

Sadly, many prospects will aim to get you off the phone or finish the meeting by asking for a proposal. This isn’t a green light for you to proceed to the next stage in the process, but actually a full stop for them. You then waste huge amounts of time writing the proposal, then more time following up with them, whilst they never return your calls. Familiar scenario?

If you are asked to write a proposal, do make sure you elicit some kind of commitment from the client before you go ahead and write the full monty. Our recommendation is you suggest to your client the following:

If your client doesn’t commit to this, then explore how motivated they are to take action… Also, don’t spend anymore time than the draft thoughts via email.

2. Check they can afford you

Whilst you don’t want to be inflexible about your fees, or frighten potential clients away – you do want to be open about the likely costs of what hiring you may be. This will help to weed out any unsuitable clients without the right level of budget BEFORE you waste time on a lengthy proposal to find out that you are too expensive for them.

If you don’t have commitment to a budget which matches your fee levels, then take the time to explore whether they could have the budget before writing your proposal. You may these questions useful to help you do this exploration:

3. Check they actually want a proposal

You may find that your client doesn’t the full formality of a war and peace style proposal. A quick email with the key points highlighted may be all they need to press the go button. Before you get the proposal template out, do check to see what they actually need to proceed.

4. Use the firm’s ‘go/no-go checklist’

Within your firm you probably collectively have a good knowledge of what tends to convert and be a good piece of work for a client, and what the firm should steer clear of. This knowledge has probably been put into a weighted ‘go/no-go’ checklist for fee earners and partners to use BEFORE they commit firm resources to a lead or tender. Use it!

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 4 cast-iron reasons NOT to write a proposal appeared first on Big4.com.

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.

I’ve recently been asked this question twice in the last few days. Both times the accountants asking the question were a few years post qualification and keen to bring in their own clients. However, they were finding that their inexperience was counting against them. It’s the tough question facing many keen, but young accountants and consultants.

How do I quickly build up enough credibility so that I can win my own work?

This is the advice I gave to the two of them:

What are you going to be famous for? Or what will your thing be?

If I do a quick internet search for you, I should be able to find you on social media, and probably LinkedIn, and see easily what you are a specialist in. If I can’t find you, then your potential clients can’t find you either. Clients have changed their buying habits – they will now want to check out your credibility independently of your firm on-line.

However, I shouldn’t just be able to find you, I should be able to quickly and easily see what ‘your thing’ is. If you are hedging your bets and trying to be all things to all people, this is only going to appeal to no-one.

Within the Career Kitbag you will find a guide to choosing and leveraging your niche. Read this guide, and this will help you find your ‘thing’.

Look around your firm, where are their areas of growing specialisation, or other fee earners growing out of their specialism? For example, when I interviewed Carl Reader, Partner at Dennis & Turnbull, for ‘The Go-To-Expert: How to be recognised, valued, booked and in demand for doing what you love’, he told me that he had initially built up a specialism for martial arts clubs. A partner in his firm had a portfolio of 30 martial arts club clients, and he worked with this partner to become the firm’s and marketplace expert for martial arts clubs. Over time he then broadened his specialism from martial arts clubs to franchising.

Build your profile and visibility for ‘your thing’

Once you have decided on your thing, you need to build a footprint and reputation for your thing. Until you have some real clients you are working on for ‘your thing’, you are going to need to research, talk and write about ‘your thing’. This will help you to build your profile and visibility with the clients and intermediaries that could give you work. This is going to be a large amount of spade work on your part.

This will involve branding yourself for your ‘thing’ (and committing to this), in addition to writing and commenting about ‘your thing’. At this stage, it doesn’t matter if your thing is quite a narrow technical speciality and/or audience you do it for. (Remember Carl started with a tiny niche, martial arts clubs.) You can expand your focus later.

To help you plan how to build your profile and visibility download the marketing plan and associated activities, plus guide to content planning, from the Career Kitbag to help you think through what to write about, what content to share, which social media channels to share it across etc

Only once your have built up a ‘brand’ and ‘profile’ for your thing will you get to the point where clients may come to you for some help.

Leverage off others to quickly build your credibility and get a foot in the door

Your own credibility is going to take time to build. One way of taking some short cuts is to work with someone in the industry who has bucket loads of credibility. This could be someone in your firm or someone in your network with a complementary skill set. It may be that a partner is retiring in a few years and there is going to be a gap in the partnership when he or she goes.

Realistic timescales

Good things come to those who are prepared to wait – and the same can be said for your reputation and profile. If you work hard at building your reputation and profile, it is realistic to expect that you should see some reward for your labours within 6-12 months.

What are your tips for winning your first client?

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 4 tips to help you win your first client appeared first on Big4.com.

In this blog post, Heather considers the 5 ways your network can help you get your next new role.

1. Be clear on what you are looking for

Focus and motivation are two factors which separate the successful job seeker from the unsuccessful job seeker. If you are going to use the power of your network to find your next role you need to be very clear and disciplined about how many people you talk to and what you talk to them about.

2. Exploit the power of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is now most recruiters (agency and in-house) database for candidates. I think without probably exception every recruiter of professional staff is on LinkedIn and extensively uses it to search for suitable candidates. If you would like some FREE templates to help you build a great LinkedIn professional headline and summary, look in my free career kitbag here

It goes without saying that your profile on LinkedIn needs to be immaculate – but branded for the role you want, rather than the role you have now. If you are looking for a new role, you owe it to yourself to make sure your profile stands out for positive reasons – for example, do take the time to gain recommendations from your contact list, as these do make you stand out from your peers. Similar to electronic CVs you need to make sure your LinkedIn profile is peppered with keywords relevant to the type of roles you are looking for.

3. Get out there

There is no substitute for pressing the flesh and working your way through your little black book. Write a list of everyone that you know personally and professionally. Then, divide your list into 3 categories – likely to help, not sure if can help, unlikely to help. However, do not discount the people in the ‘unlikely to help’ category, they may someone that knows someone that knows someone who can help you. Maintain an excel spreadsheet with all your contacts and update it as you contact everyone on your list – but maintaining more frequent contact with people in the ‘likely to help’ and ‘not sure if can help’. As you speak with all your contacts make sure you ask the question – ‘who can you recommend that I talk with who can help me?’

4. Become very close to your recruitment consultants

When a recruitment consultant gets briefed about a role, you need to be top of their mind. To be top of their mind you need to be a person rather than just a CV… So, how do you do this? What worked for me was when I saw a role advertised, phoning the agent direct and talking them through my personal elevator pitch, before sending them through my CV. This approach guaranteed myself getting onto the agency’s books . Once I was properly established on an agency’s books I would phone them a minimum of fortnightly to establish contact.

If you would like help to win business from your network, how about downloading your free copy, from my Career Kitbag, of my Joined Up Networking toolkit,

5. Be open to possibilities

About a month ago I received a speculative application for my business. At the point in time I was not recruiting, but after receiving the letter I rang the letter writer directly – offering to have a conversation and saw an interesting opportunity to expand my personal network. The letter writer never returned my call. How likely am I going to be to want to work with this person in the future? Do be prepared to face rejection in your job search – but always be open to possibilities and to have a conversation. You never know where or what it may lead to….
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 5 ways to use your network to help you get your next role appeared first on Big4.com.

In today’s post, Heather shares 10 tips to help you get the right results next time you find yourself working the room. 

1. Do your homework in advance

Ask your host for a guest list in advance. Identify 3-6 people that you want to have a conversation with. Do some research on the contacts you want to meet – what line of business are they in? What may be the particular business or personal challenges that they may be facing? On the day before you go to the networking event, have a quick look at some of the on-line news websites, and relevant trade journals, and formulate an opinion on some of the top stories.

If you would like help to win business from your network, how about downloading your free copy, from our free Career Kitbag, of my Joined Up Networking toolkit, or Networking Plan, Relationship Plan or even a step-by-step guide to writing your own marketing plan.

2. Have the right kit with you

By this I mean, have a personalised badge already made up with your logo. So that you never suffer the networking faux pas of coming out without your business cards, keep a store of business cards in your wallet and the glove pocket of your car. Carry a small notepad and pen with you – no larger than the size of a cigarette packet. You can then use this to jot down things you have agreed to do for people you have met.

3. Have your elevator pitch worked out

When you meet someone for the first time, they are going to inevitably ask you what you do. Have a 30 second paragraph worked out in advance which tells people ‘what value you bring to your clients’, and your target market. At many networking events you may be required to do a 60 second spot or a 5 minute spot. Expand your 30 sec paragraph into a 60 second and 5 minute talk.

To make your time in the limelight more memorable for the people you are talking to, ask them a question which will help to connect what you do, with something they may need.

If you would like help with your elevator pitch, how about downloading your elevator pitch template, from our free Career Kitbag, of my Joined Up Networking toolkit.

4. Think about your positioning

Make sure you are positioned so that you are facing the door (or early in the event, facing the table where people collect their badges). That way you can see who is arriving, without having to look away from the person you are talking to. In the 5 minutes before you will sit down for a meal, go into a seminar etc, aim to be talking to one of your targets for the evening. That way, you will end up building rapport with them through the ‘feature’ of the event.

5. Finding a person to talk to

We’ve all been there – we arrive at an event and everyone seems to be talking and you are feeling like billy-no-mates. Position yourself near to the drinks table, buffet – people will walk past you, and take the opportunity to introduce yourself. After all, everyone at a networking event is there to meet new people.

If you see someone standing on their own, make eye contact with them and smile at them. 99% of the time, they will be really glad to be ‘rescued’ and welcome a conversation with you.

If everyone seems to be standing or sitting around in groups, then look for groups of people who are standing in an open formation  – i.e. group members who are standing looking into the room. Approach the group, and ask permission to join them.

6. Starting a conversation

An exceptionally common fear is not knowing  what to say to someone you have just met. There are some really easy openers to a conversation:

“Hello, I’m ….

AND THEN…

“How’s your day been?”

“How was your journey here today?’

“What have you got planned for the rest of the day?”

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Do you know many people here today?”

“What do you do?”

“What does your company do?”

7. Keeping a conversation going

Always turn up to a networking event as yourself. If you try and be someone that you are not, you will come across as shallow and insincere. Normally people love to talk about their business – so aim to get someone talking about their business, listen to what they are saying – and find ways of personally complimenting them on that they have achieved

8. Introduce other people as if they are very special or important

If someone asks to join your group, do take the time to introduce everyone in the group. When you are introducing a person, give some nugget about them, e.g. Alan is great at opening doors into potential clients

9. Find a reason to stay in touch

Now, Mr Smith from Fantastic Widgets may not be your target client. But he may know someone that is. If you want to stay in touch, then ask for their business card. But, it is more powerful to find a reason to stay in touch. For example, ‘have you met so-and-so? – I’ll send you their details’, ‘I was reading a great article – I will send you a copy’

10. Do ask for permission to circulate

It is very easy to get stuck talking with one person at a networking event. Look out for signs from the person you are talking to that they are looking to end the conversation – an easy giveaway is that their eyes will start to wander around the room. This is your cue to wrap up the conversation.

However, if you are left with a ‘cling-on’, then take the opportunity to introduce them to someone else and politely move on to a new conversation.
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 tips to help you look and feel confident when working the room 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.

I’ve got an confession to make…. wait for it… I let my inbox get submerged. In fact before I went on holiday my inbox started to get deluged, and I couldn’t find the important e-mails, let alone have the energy to find them. It’s a bit of a disaster for someone who probably gets most of her leads emailed to her…

The question is, how did I stop my inbox jamming up again?

Stop procrastinating

Very simply, procrastinating on an over-flowing inbox just makes it worse, the problem doesn’t go away, however hard you try. And believe me, I was wishing really really hard that they would all go away… As I looked through the e-mail (sort it by person) I realised that newsletters and forum updates were jamming up my inbox and hiding the important e-mails from both clients and potential clients. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, I get about 150 emails a day, of which only 30 really need me to look at them.

Make time to deal with the problem

If you are sitting there with over 300+ or 1000+ emails in your inbox, set a time and date when you will have reduced this to zero. If you have to put a few diary appointments in your diary to deal with your email, then do it. You may be able to enlist the help of a secretary or PA to help you reduce the pile.

Use an archive folder to get to inbox zero instantly

A quick way to get to inbox zero is to remove everything in your inbox and place in a folder called ‘to archive’. If anything is particularly urgent, someone will get back to you…

Use rules to deal with newsletters and forum updates

I now have a very strict newsletter policy in place. If I have not given my permission to subscribe, I will unsubscribe and report as spam. If I have subscribed, I have set up a folder where all my newsletters go into. I then read them when I want some down time.

I’ve also put all the forum replies and updates which were jamming up my inbox into their very own folder & they are now sent automatically into this folder. Once again, I now read them when I want some down time. I was finding that social media was taking over my life and inbox in a bad way…

Don’t treat your inbox as a pending tray

The next big rule is to stop treating your inbox as a pending tray. Either delete, action, archive or schedule to deal with at another time. Don’t leave in your inbox waiting for an action to take place.

To help you get more organised and get more things done in a day how about downloading from our Free Career Kitbag our weekly and daily planners, plus to-do list managers? (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 How to permanently eliminate a cluttered and over-flowing inbox 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.

This article was originally published in ACCA’s in-practice e-zine.

Differentiating yourself from your peers is the challenge that every accountant faces. With today’s clients more inclined to look for a better service or deal, the pressure is on for every firm and professional to justify their fee levels and increase the value they bring to clients.

One way of curing these commercial headaches is to grow a reputation as the ‘go to expert’ within your marketplace and firm. Heather Townsend, co-author of How to make partner and still have a life gives her six top tips to achieving this status.

1. Identify your niche and commit to it
It’s common sense really, but it’s much easier to be ‘the expert’ on a small subject or niche than a large specialism. Your aim is not to piggy-back on someone else’s expertise, but to develop a niche that helps differentiate you - in your firm and the marketplace at large.

What sector or technical specialism will become important for your firm and clients in the next five years? Where are there specific gaps within your firm’s expertise? Clues could be: over-loaded partners or practice areas, rapidly expanding departments, or partners on the retirement track.

Don’t just look for clues internally: what’s happening within your market which will cause a requirement for new skills or expertise? For example, ten years ago (outside of the film and music industry) no one had heard of crowd-funding.

Your niche does not need to remain static over time – it will grow and develop as you become more successful. For example, you could decide to focus on becoming the ‘crowd-funding’ expert for your firm and then develop into the expert in raising business finance outside of the normal routes, eg banks, private equity, angel investors etc.

Many people decide to have a niche, but fail to truly commit to it. If you are not passionate about what you do, then it’s unlikely you’ll ever actually achieve ‘go to expert’ status.

Download from our Career Kitbag our free guide to choosing and capitalising on your niche. (Email required)

2. Identify your sound bite
If I asked you, what do you do? Or, why do clients choose to work with you? Could you articulate this in one short sentence? For example:

• ‘I help property developers get the best possible price for their business on exit’

This is your ‘sound bite’, and, ideally, it will become your suffix – what people attach to your name when they talk about you. Some other excellent sound bites used by accountants include:

• ‘I help big brands get value for money from their marketing agencies’
• ‘I help family owned groups of company grow and protect their wealth’
• ‘I advise retail companies helping them pay the lowest legal and ethical amount of tax’

A good sound bite should include who you work with and the value you bring to these clients.

3. Write about your subject
It’s often said that a book is the best business card you can ever have. However, before you sharpen your pencils, you don’t need to go the whole hog and become a published author. You can write blog posts, white papers, articles for online and printed magazines or even your own e-book. Publicly communicating your expertise in this way will help get you noticed by the right people.

Many accountants worry that they will give away their crown jewels if they write about their topic too extensively. Let me assure you that most information is already freely available. The value that you bring is your ability to demonstrate your understanding of the topic and apply it to the issues/needs of your audience – this is what clients are hiring you for. The more you write about your specialism and share this knowledge, the more interested parties will come across you and therefore associate your name with this area.

4. Use social media to build up your presence
It’s actually your clients, introducers and prospects who award you the crown of ‘go to expert’. To get that crown, you need to build up an online footprint that oozes credibility and compels others to want to engage with you. Using LinkedIn, Twitter and your blog, or the firm’s blog, is an excellent way of building up your online footprint, sharing your content, connecting with influential people and building your target audience’s awareness of what you do. For example, use Twitter to share articles your niche would benefit from reading and join a LinkedIn group frequented by your clients and peers.

5. Speak about your subject
While social media may be the ‘new-fangled’ route to becoming the ‘go to expert’, speaking and presenting about your subject is still a tried and trusted way to gaining acknowledgement as an expert. Therefore, dust off your public speaking skills and offer your services to speak at events, conferences or tele-seminars where you know existing and potential clients might be.

6. Build strategic alliances
One of the best ways to create word-of-mouth recognition is to build strategic alliances. Actively look for people who either have a complementary skill to you, or work in the same niche. Getting referred to clients by a small, close-knit circle of introducers can help you extend your own reach significantly. To increase your commitment to building strategic alliances, give yourself a target for the amount of new business you want to win via this process.

Download from our Career Kitbag our free guide to building your personal networking strategy to help you find the right people to form strategic alliances with. (email required)

In summary, becoming the ‘go to expert’ will take hard work – you won’t get there overnight. However, stick at it – the rewards are well and truly worth waiting for.
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 6 tips to help you become the Go-To-Expert 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.

Imagine yourself working the room…. Do you find it hard to memorise people’s names? It’s very embarrassing to forget someone’s name – and how many of us feel we are good at remembering names? Forgetting people names at networking event is a real fear for many accountants, consultants and professionals in general.

Here are 7 easy tips to help you remember people’s names:

1. Use their name

It may sound a little forced to start with, but after you have met someone, try to use their name a couple of times whilst speaking with them. For example:

[quote]“Good to meet you, Simon. What have you found useful so far about this event, Simon?[/quote]

Read this blog post to help others memorise your name.

2. Don’t be afraid to repeat it

If you don’t hear the name properly or clearly, for example if the room is busy and noisy, then ask them to repeat it.  As long as you haven’t met them a few times, there is nothing wrong in asking them to say their name again as you didn’t quite catch it at the beginning of the conversation.

3. Make an association

As you meet someone, you should make an association with them and their name. For example:

• Rita was wearing a great red broach
• Small Jim was about to become a father for the second time
• Sarah had the loud voice
• Michael, the very funny football playing accountant

4. Further details

After you have finished meeting them, don’t instantly move on. Take the time to write on their business card any additional details about them that will remind you who they are.

5. Be positive

Stop telling yourself how bad you are at remembering names. I used to think I was terrible at remembering peoples names – however it wasn’t not because I was, but due to being a trainer and literally meeting hundreds of new people in a week. Inevitably, there were always going to be a few people I would meet months later who I would struggle to recall their name. (Particularly when I would bump into them in the staff restaurant) If you tell yourself that you are good at recalling names – and use all of these techniques in this blog post you will get instantly better at remembering names.

6. Don’t stress

If you have forgotten someone’s name, the sooner you raise it, the less embarrassing it gets. You may discover that they have forgotten your name as well!  Such as:

“I’m really sorry, but I’ve forgotten your name, would you mind repeating it?”

7. Double check

Names which are not from our native language are hard to remember. Check you have the pronunciation right – this will have two benefits. Firstly, you get to say the name a few times, and secondly you make sure you get their name right.

To help you get the most out of your networking time and effort, download from our Career Kitbag our free guide to building your personal networking strategy and our joined up networking tool-kit. (email required)

What are your personal tips for recalling names?
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 7 tips to help you remember names when networking at an event 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.

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.

Are you concerned about how much email you will be going back to after the Easter break? Or is your email inbox always an over-flowing disaster area? If so you are in good company, with many other professionals – including me!

Today I reached Inbox Zero. It’s not something which happens often in my professional life. Despite penning articles such as how to permanently eliminate a cluttered inbox, I am ashamed to admit, that I have struggled, and still struggle regularly to keep on top of my email.

In this blog post I will share how we kid ourselves with our email, and share some realistic, light touch and low process best practice to help you keep on top of your inbox.

1. The less email you receive the easier it is to get to inbox zero

It doesn’t matter how good you are at sifting your email, or how many rules you set up, the less email you receive, the less email you have to deal with, and, therefore, the easiest it is to stay on top of your email. To help yourself, shall we say, deal with the source of the problem, religiously unsubscribe from any newsletter or bulk marketing emails which you don’t read regularly.

2. Setting up folders called ‘to read at a later date’ isn’t normally effective

Do you do this? You set up the folder, and put a task to read the email in your  ’read at a later date’ folder. For the first few days, it seems to work… Then, typically all you do is leave these emails in this folder and don’t look at them ever again. It becomes another archive folder. Any manual process where you double handle or double process an email, very often doesn’t work unless you are very disciplined in the first place. If you are very disciplined in the first place, you probably don’t have a problem keeping on top of your email!

Unless you use an automated email productivity solution like sanebox, the challenge of processing emails in ‘to action’, ‘to read’, ‘to file’, ‘read at a later date’, often just doesn’t happen.

3. Forget filing emails – either action, schedule, delete or archive

Unless you have a work email system where you have a severely limited size of your email folder, then set up a folder called archive. Then use a ‘to do’ list manager or email tool like sanebox to either schedule when you will process the email, delete the email or send it to the archive to keep it for a later date. You are more likely to find the email when you need to re-read by searching for it rather than looking for it in the folder you remembered to save it in.

4. Don’t use your inbox as your pending tray

All this does is encourage you to procrastinate on emails and build up high levels of emails in your inbox. Referring back to point 3, when you receive an email either process it immediately, delete it, schedule it to process for a certain date, or send it to your archive folder if you may need it in the future. If you only take one thing from this article, this is probably the biggest secret to inbox zero.

5. Set a task to follow up on email

One of the ways I cluttered up my inbox was to leave in my inbox emails which I needed an answer or to follow up on. (i.e. let your inbox become your ‘pending tray’) Unfortunately there is no easy way to do this (unless you use sanebox to set a reminder, and redeliver the email back into your inbox on the date you want to follow up). One ‘fudge’ way to do this is add the ‘follow up’ as a task to your scheduled to do list. Then add the email which you are waiting for a reply on to your archive folder.

6. Process your email in batches

Yes, it is more effective to process your email in batches. Set yourself times during the day when you will go in and blitz your email. It’s far easier to do this when you have reached inbox zero. It’s when the emails in your inbox starts to increase, that it becomes easier to ignore the set times for process email, and fall into bad habits again.

To help you plan your day more effectively, how about downloading from our Career Kitbag one of our free day or weekly planners? (email required)

Ultimately at the end of the day you will only keep on top of your email if you have a powerful motivate to do so. What’s going to motivate you to change your behaviour?

What are your tips for staying on top of emails?

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 6 simple but effective email tips for everyone who struggles to keep their email under control 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.

With many countries in the world winding down for the Easter break, you may be in the position of needing to clear your desk and get through a large to-do list before you can enjoy the four day easter weekend. Here are our tips for doing just that, so that you can make good on your promises this Easter Break to family and friends to ‘have a life outside of work’

1. Prioritise

Not everything needs to get done by the Easter break. Look at what’s on your to-do list and prioritise it. Now decide on what really needs to get done by the end of today.  For free weekly planners, and to-do list organisers click here (email required)

2. Delegate

You don’t have to do everything on your to do list. Look at the top priorities on your to do list:

• who can help you with these?
• who would benefit from helping you with these?
• who in the office is bored because they have nothing to do?

3. Take regular breaks

The temptation today is to work right through this week and not stop for anything. After all, you’ve got too much to do to stop? Right? Wrong. Timetabling in several short breaks – whether to get a cup of tea or a quick walk around the block, will help you clear your mind and become more productive on the next task at hand.

4. Turn off distractions

Yes, go into a quiet room away from all distractions like happy, chatty and unoccupied colleagues. Turn your phone, social media and email off. Then get your head down and chomp through your to do list.

Download from our Free Career Kitbag  free weekly planners, and to-do list organisers click here (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 How to clear your desk so you can go away on holiday guilt-free 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.

One of the hardest things to do when going for partner is to make the time to build your own client portfolio. It’s the constant challenge of any senior professional in a professional services firm – business development OR chargeable work. Never the twain shall meet!

I recently had the privilege of interviewing Ian Cooper, author of ‘The FT Guide To Business Development‘ and ‘How to be a time master‘. He combines his thirty years of working with lawyers and professional service firms on business development, and his time master skills. In the interview, he lifted the lid on what so many of you are telling me you need - how to find and make the time to build your own client following.

In the interview, Ian advises on the following to help you make the time to build your own client portfolio:

1) Build your business development skills

If you only have limited time for business development, then surely it makes sense to be the best you can at business development? Take all the opportunities you can do to develop your business development skills, at the earliest point and time in your career as possible. For two ways to build your business development skills, and save time with your business development, download from our Free Career Kitbag a free guide to building a marketing plan and a guide to building your personal networking strategy. (e-mail required)

2) Invest in social media

Social media is a great tool to help you nurture and manage relationships, whilst building your profile, from your desks. Yes, really, from your desk. This means that you can be using dead time during the day to interact and share valuable content on social media. Before social media, business development activities typically meant that you needed to go out from your office and go networking, or meet/phone your network in person. Download from our Free Career Kitbag,  2 factsheets to help you construct a powerful Linkedin profile for you, click here (email required).

3) Don’t always assume meetings start on the half hour or whole hour

In his interview, Ian Cooper gives some valuable advice, that until you have freed up some time, it becomes impossible to take time out to reflect on your big goals, focus or do business development activities. A great way of finding more time in the day is to start meetings on more than just the half hour or on the hour. Plus, do all your meetings need to be 30 mins or 60 mins? What about 20 mins, 10 mins, 45 mins?

4) Don’t let people steal your time

How often do you find people in the office or on the phone, saying “do you have a minute?”. They very rarely want a minute of your time. What they want is a conversation with you, which will take up some of your time. Before you say yes, find out what they want and the likely time commitment they need from you. Once you have done this, you can decide whether you really have that ‘minute’. To help you plan your day and week so you get the right things done, download from our free Career Kitbag  our free weekly planners and daily organisers. (email required)

5) Develop a niche and specialism

If you find that you have the same bland specialisms as many of your peers and partners, then you are always going to be fighting to get picked, chosen or given new work. That’s because there will always be alternative options for the partners, introducers and clients to give new instructions to. By claiming your own niche and specialism – particularly one which the firm is desperate to develop, then you will find it easier to be given referrals. Download from our free career kitbag a free guide to help you find your niche. (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.

The post 5 simple ways to make the time for business development 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.

I spend several days most months working with professionals, such as lawyers, accountants and consultants, helping them improve their business networking skills. Very often I am asked by delegates on my workshops, how to go from networking to ‘show me the money‘, i.e. how to win business from my networking activities.

Removing the myth that you can win invoice-able business with just one handshake

Firstly, before we even go into the specifics of how to win business from your network, I think it is important to address a huge myth that many professionals have about networking. They believe, whether logically or rationally, that if you go networking you have to go out and come back with real invoice-able business. In the world of professional services we don’t sell a £20 product – which means that what you are selling is a considered purchase. A considered purchase is one where the price is high and the risk to the buyer of something going wrong is high. This means that before someone will buy something from you, it’s going to take more than one chance meeting and a cup of coffee after that meeting, before enough trust and credibility has been established for a business development conversation will take place.

So, why do we kid ourselves to make some quick wins with business development from networking?

How to go from networking to show me the money?

There is still the question of ‘how can I go from networking to winning business from my network’.

Most professional service firms win over 80% of their new business from referrals. e.g.

• existing clients wanting more from the firm
• existing clients recommending the firm to others
• professional intermediaries recommending the firm to others

With this fact in mind, you may have noticed that the two most important types of people to win new business are from existing clients and professional intermediaries. Therefore, the question to ask yourself is as follows:

1. Does my networking activities bring me into regular contact with existing clients and professional intermediaries?
2. Am I putting in place relationship plans for existing clients and professional intermediaries so that I can remain ‘top-of-their-mind’? This is essential to do, particularly when you have no current matters on your desk to deal with for a client.
3. Does my network know the kind of opportunities or referrals I am looking for?
4. Am I spending over 70% of my time deepening and maintaining existing relationships with clients and professional intermediaries within my network?
5. Do I have a process or system which I follow religiously when I have met the right person to deepen the relationship and warm up any potential leads? (Without selling at this stage!)

If you would like help to win business from your network, how about downloading from our Career Kitbag your free copy of my Joined Up Networking toolkit, or Networking Plan, Relationship Plan or even a step-by-step guide to writing your own marketing plan. e-mail required

When you can answer these questions with a ‘yes’, then you will have cracked the code to how to win business via my network.

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.

The post How to go from ‘working the room’ to winning clients by networking appeared first on Big4.com.

Typically potential clients and professional intermediaries will ‘meet’ you first on LinkedIn. (After all, what do you do when you hear someone’s name you are recommended to talk to, google them…) The days when ‘professional networkers’ had big rolodex’s on their desk stuffed full of business cards are receding fast.  In this post we are going to look at what needs to go into your daily routine on LinkedIn to use it as a great business development tool.

Before we do that, let’s consider the alternatives. Face-to-face networking. Yes, the form of professional torture that partners assume that we professionals are naturally born to do. (After all, how much training have you ever been given to allow you to network effectively?)

If you go to a face-to-face networking event, which lasts say 1-2 hours (a conservative estimate). You will probably spend between 1-2 hours travelling there and back. Then, you will probably spend 1-2 hours prepping before the event  and following up after the event.

Totting up the numbers, this means that one face-to-face networking event  will take up between 3 and 6 hours of your time. But, as you are always being told by the partners in your firm, if you want to develop your own client portfolio, that’s what you need to do – get yourself out there. (or do you?)

The daily LinkedIn routine I will describe will allow you to ditch at least one networking event a month, possibly more – and if you only ditch one face-to-face networking event a month will save you between 2-5 hours every month.

LinkedIn did some research which found out that the optimum amount of time on LinkedIn per day is 9 minutes. (yes, I know there is a certain amount of conflicting interests here, but let’s go with it) Here is your ideal daily LinkedIn routine. (This assumes you already have a decent LinkedIn profile, for guides to help you write your profile, click here – email required)

1. set your clock – as you only want to use 9 minutes of your time
2. Have a look at who has viewed your profile and send a message/connect with anyone who is interesting
3. If you have time left, then add a status update, i.e. share an interesting bit of content for your target market or some good news story about you or your firm (new client won, etc)
4. If you have time left, look down your LinkedIn wall and comment/like some of the updates by important people in your network
5. If you still have time left, go into one of your LinkedIn groups and leave one comment on one discussion
6. Job done!

Your effectiveness in using this routine on LinkedIn, will be significantly improved, if you:

1) Commit to your niche – particularly in your LinkedIn Summary and LinkedIn professional headline (for help with this how about downloading our free guides on LinkedIn?)

2) Have a well thought out and well written LinkedIn profile, which highlights your credibility in your chosen niche (click here for a guide to find and capitalise on your niche – email required)

3) Have carefully researched the groups that you participate in – i.e. they are engaged communities with a large proportion of your target market in the group

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 How to use LinkedIn daily to win business 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.

One of the challenges faced by any professional going for partnership, is how to find the time to build up a partner-sized portfolio – particularly when you have lengthy chargeable time targets to hit. One of the best ways of saving time with your business development, is to do as much of it as possible from your desk using social media to grow your profile and visibility, and widen your network. The challenge faced by many accountants and consultants with social media is literally, ‘how do I have something meaningful to say on social media’. This challenge can often be a barrier to successfully using social media within their marketing mix.

In this post, I will be giving you 5 ideas on how to always have something (meaningful) to say on social media.

1. Decide on what you will say and what you wouldn’t say upfront

It can often make it easier to have a discussion with your team on what is appropriate or not appropriate to say on social media. When people know the ‘rules of the game’ it can make it much easier to unblock the writer’s block.

Very often, within the professions, there is a perception that ‘chit-chatting’ on social media, particularly Twitter, is a bad thing to do, as it makes you seem boring. Actually, in real life, this chit-chatting is something that we do all the time, and it oils the wheels of any relationship. If you give yourself permission to chit-chat and what you will or wouldn’t chit-chat about, it makes it much easier to find you’ve got something to say.

2. Take the pressure off yourself to be perfect, witty or insightful

I strongly believe that accountants and consultants, similar to many professionals, feel that as social media is such a public environment that they have to have their game face on at all times. There is a pressure to be seen to be the embodiment of a perfect professional, i.e. insightful, interesting and sharp. Actually, the only person you have to be on social media is yourself. Yes, you. You need to show up as the person that your potential clients, clients and intermediaries want to work with. When you give yourself permission to be yourself, it suddenly becomes much easier to say something.

3.Have a store of useful websites, interesting people on Twitter and tweet streams

There are days when even the most talkative people on Twitter feel as if they don’t have anything to say. Regardless of whether you have writer’s block or not, it’s always useful to have a source of inspiration for social media. This could be:

• a content plan, which guides you what to write, tweet and link to (download our free guide to content planning here)
• an RSS reader filled with feeds from blogs and news sites that inspire you to write or comment or tweet links
• a list on twitter with people who make it easy to chat to them, or comment on their content
• a bookmarked list of blogs or website with good content for you to share

4. Use buffer app

I will often scan my key twitter lists a couple of times a day and see interesting content being shared. Sometimes I will retweet the interesting stuff there and then. Other times I will ‘favourite’ it. Then once a week, I will go through my favourites and put the tweets into a ‘buffer‘. This great piece of software then shares my interesting content across the week at times when my twitter followers are normally around. This takes the pressure of me always ‘having to be there’, and always having to have something interesting to say. In fact, if you so wish, using buffer really makes it easy just to go into twitter once a day for 5 mins or so.

5. Have a list of stock phrases and questions

One of my clients actually scheduled a list of questions in the morning that he would ask his followers. Whilst, I’m not suggesting doing this, how about having a list of standard questions that you will pick from to ask your followers and encourage engagement with them?

6. Remember the same rules in social media apply to when you are working the room

Social media is just the same as when you are out networking. It’s all about meeting people and forming a relationship, before deepening the relationship with a 1:2:1. Therefore, think about the opening lines you tend to rely on to start a conversation with the people you meet when working the room? Click here for a free guide to building your personal networking strategy, and networking plans and templates. (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 Townsend will be appearing at the ‘How to make partner‘ conference in London on the 24th April 2013.

The post How to always have something meaningful to say on social media 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.

While most individuals today may say they know their way around a computer, what a lot of IT professionals find when interacting with the average computer user is that they know how to do very specific things; like checking email, updating Facebook, and doing other tasks online that they’re familiar with. But very few individuals have computer literacy in the form of understanding intuitively how technology works or doesn’t work. This creates a significant obstacle for employers looking to implement idea management software in the workplace.

Effective idea management software creates a platform that doesn’t just collect ideas, but allows you to implement a user interface that’s echoes some of the technology your employees are already using. If employees are able to “follow” an idea, “like” it, “vote” for it, or post comments on it in a similar fashion as they would on Facebook or Twitter, they are far more likely to engage in the innovation process than if they have to learn a brand new piece of technology.

Whenever making the choice for an idea management software provider, make sure you consider not only how well it collects and analyses ideas, but also what sort of user interface and experience it provides your employees, clients, constituents or stakeholders. Without an effective grasp on the user experience, you might find that whatever platform you implement has limited success and capacity.

If you’re interested in exploring how idea management software can parallel social networks, consider downloading our Guide.

—

Simon Hill is CEO and co-founder of Wazoku, an idea management software company, an Associate Director with the Venture Capital Firm Find Invest Grow and an active member of the London technology and entrepreneurial community. Simon is an alumni of PWC, Deloitte and Cap Gemini.

The post Idea Management Software Engagement appeared first on Big4.com.

By Tim Reed, Big4.com Guest Blogger    

The waves of Technology keep coming, some more powerful than others. We have an opportunity to harness each wave and drive new levels of performance and ultimately new levels of success.  The advent of mobile applications, real time cloud solutions and other new advances have created the reality that organizations are faced with an immediate challenge to managing multiple competing interests amongst multiple business organizations, all striving to take advantage of the latest new  wave.  IT organizations are struggling to react to each new wave, often viewed as getting in the way of delivery, not reacting quickly enough and, in some cases, curtailing overall business delivery.

My view is that instead of standing in front of the wave and deciding whether to jump out of the way or into the wave, it is wiser to learn how to surf the wave and take advantage of the new-found capability. Once you are able to figure out how to surf, you will start to realize the energy it will bring to your enterprise.

Think about whether or not you are able to do the following:

• Are you using a short evolutionary cycle or developing and deploying the latest technologies?    One strategy you could take to drive performance and new capabilities is to require that new technologies adopt a short cycle of prototyping and testing, no longer than 60 days. This gives you the ability to understand if the latest technology fits your enterprise and what will be necessary for integration into your current environment.  This approach can limit the risk exposure and provide a path to examine whether the technology meets the demands of the line of business and the overall enterprise.   The teams who are able to make this shift, can change the overall model and perceptions of IT performance and delivery.  The pressure shifts from IT delivery to the business’ ability to choose technologies that meet the business need by speeding delivery, lowering risks and improving overall enterprise capability.  At this point you are not just riding the wave, but also encouraging others to join the ride.

• Can you predict where performance is needed?    A quick query into the methods you use to forecast your performance demands, delivery expectations, and the tools you use to meet performance requirements will identify the performance gaps that need to be addressed.  Consider a new approach that creates a process to provide rapid feedback with leads from several internal and external areas (eg: think of your current vendors, the cloud marketplace, industry forums) to provide a rapid response to your issues.   Expand your view of performance to address both new development and IT infrastructure and operational delivery. Once you have the feedback, take another look to determine how you can deploy the solution. If you are challenged with timing and precision around deployment, consider the notes above …can you shift to a shorter cycle to deploy the solution?  Applying this approach will move the conversation from a reactive response to pro-active engagement, driving a broader and more integrated focus.  If you can make this shift, you will be able to see the wave coming and predict where and how you need to move.

Creating an approach to accept, identify and react to new technologies is critical.  IT has the ability to drive exploration and then move forward with technology choices that work for your organization.  The challenge is how best to harness or capture the “Technology Wave” to drive new performance and improve capability.  The business user expects IT to be riding the Wave, reacting quickly and moving to the next Wave.

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).  Working for multiple global firms, the ReedITC Team  has led several  IT and Operational initiatives, including Data and Enterprise Cloud Transformations. For more information, please visit www.reeditc.com or contact tim.reed@reeditc.com

The post Surfing the “Technology Wave” to achieve Performance and Success 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.

Social media can be a great networking, profile building and all-round great business development tool for accountants and consultants. One of the drawbacks to using social media is the same as networking. If you don’t know why you are using it and how you will use it, to win business, it can be a huge black hole for your time. Consequently, I am often asked about how to effectively use social media, without it taking up too much time. After all, your billing targets don’t reduce just because you decide to use social media within your business development mix.

In this blog post, I will give you some ideas about how to save time with social media.

1. Be choosy where you decide to network

As I mentioned in the introduction to this blog post, social media can be a big black hole where time is concerned. There are just so many communities where you can dip into and out of, which may eventually lead to work. Your aim is to limit yourself to (at most) 3 social networking sites – and limit yourself to a maximum of 3 groups on any one of those sites.

Ideally where you spend your time on social media needs to be part of your networking strategy, download our free guide on how to build your personal networking strategy. (email required)

2. Work to a content plan

Social media works best when it is fully integrated within your business development strategy and plans. Therefore, work to a content plan to focus your mind on what to share and when. If you struggle with what to say on social media, then read ‘5 ways to always have something meaningful to say on social media‘.

3. Automate your content but not your conversations

Sharing tips and links to good articles, i.e. ‘your content’, does not always need to be done ‘live’. These are things you can automate effectively with tools such as bufferapp and bulk scheduling tools such as hootsuite.

4. Integrate social media into your daily routine

What do you do when you get into the office in the morning? Check your email and voicemail? Well, add in 15 mins extra of time with social media, where you check LinkedIn, Twitter and any other sites which you use. Read this article for a 9 minute daily routine to use on LinkedIn.

5. Use lists on twitter

Twitter lists are a great way of cutting out the noise on social media. Instead of looking at your twitter timeline daily, look at the lists which contain the people you want to stay close to on twitter.

How do you save time on social media?

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 ways to save time with social media and still win business 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.

Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

With companies encouraged to innovate more, companies may be wondering what the best way to receive and manage ideas may be. Many companies result to what we call the idea black hole – the suggestion box.

But what makes the suggestion box so nebulous? It’s not the actual box. It’s the process surrounding the box. Businesses must ask themselves the basic questions about their suggestion boxes and their innovation process: Who, what, where, why, when and how?

1. Who is your suggestion box serving? Who submits ideas frequently? Who reviews the ideas? And who implements them? Knowing the people you’re working with allows you to get a clear vision of the entire process.

2. What is your box? Is it an actual box? Or is it a piece of idea management software? Is the software providing you with all of the features and add-ons that you need in order to fully access and analyse your ideas? The method of collecting the ideas can be just as important as the ideas themselves.

3. Where is your box? Is it accessible for all people or designed to be out of the way? Ask yourself what the purpose is for even having a suggestion box if it’s not designed to accept responses from anyone. Consider that maybe a crucial demographic may not be able to access it and therefore your customer response data may be incomplete.

4. Why do you have the box? What drove you to put out a suggestion box? Did you receive harsh suggestion that helped improve your business and decided you’d like even more of those suggestions? Or did you create it to funnel complaints away from the ears and inboxes of your staff? Or did it just seem like “something you do”? Being honest with yourself about why it is you implemented the suggestion box will help you figure out your motivations for keeping it.

5. How do you implement ideas? If there’s no foundation for how your suggestion box works outside of it being a box, there’s basically no innovation process and you go back to why you implemented the idea in the first place.

Inevitably, if you’re a company that wants to continue to innovate, you’ll realise the limits of something like a suggestion box and you’ll consider expanding to idea management software. Companies that embrace the value of the input of their employees, customers, stakeholders, or constituents need the ideal situation for receive, analysing, and implementing these ideas.

—

Simon Hill is CEO and co-founder of Wazoku, an idea management software company, an Associate Director with the Venture Capital Firm Find Invest Grow and an active member of the London technology and entrepreneurial community. Simon is an alumni of PWC, Deloitte and Cap Gemini.

The post Suggestion Boxes vs. Idea Software appeared first on Big4.com.

I’ve noticed an increase in a practice on LinkedIn of adding in extra information to your LinkedIn name. In this article, I will explore the pros and cons of doing this practice and better ways to achieve the visibility and credibility you require on LinkedIn. 

So, what do I mean by this? It could be:

• adding in your phone number or contact details to your name, e.g. Heather Townsend 01234 48 0123
• adding in stars around your name, e.g. *Heather Townsend*
• adding in keywords to your name field, e.g. Heather Townsend | Executive Coach
• adding in your qualifications, e.g. Heather Townsend MCIPD

What are the reasons for doing this?

Greater visibility in searches for their profile
Many people believe, in the case of adding keywords to your name on LinkedIn, that they will then turn up in more searches. Having done a selective trial of this, I saw no evidence for this. In fact, after I had removed the offending ‘executive coach’ from my name, I saw an increase of 20% of the number of searches I turned up in, and a 100% increase in the amount of views of my profile.

If you want people to find you, when they are actually looking for you, then you must not add in extra characters to your first or second name field. Otherwise, your profile – the one they are trying to find – will end up at the bottom of the search results.

Makes you more memorable when you participate in discussions
It may make you more memorable, but probably for the wrong reasons. It seems gimmicky, potentially desperate, spammy and is that the type of 1st impression you want to give? Actually, you want to be memorable for all the right reasons, for example:

• adding in valuable and insightful comment to discussions
• including in some personality to your profile, rather than a bland corporate type of profile
• starting interesting discussions
• sharing valuable content

Makes it easier for prospects and people to contact you
There is no counter argument to this. If you do add your contact details into your name it does make it very easy for people on LinkedIn to contact you. After all, they don’t need to go to all the hassle of becoming a 1st degree connection. However, and this is a big however, the LinkedIn terms of service expressly forbids the practice of adding in anything in the ‘First and surname’ fields that is not your name.

What happens if you break the LinkedIn Terms of Service, by adding in extra words or characters to your name fields on LinkedIn

In summary,
There is no magic solution, short cut or easy ways to win business on LinkedIn. Focus on letting your content do the talking in the right places – that’s the best way for success on LinkedIn. If you want help to win business on LinkedIn and via your networking generally, how about downloading our free guide to building your personal networking strategy? (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 Townsend will be appearing at the ‘How to make partner‘ conference in London on the 24th April 2013.

The post Should you add extra stuff to your name on LinkedIn? appeared first on Big4.com.

To become a client’s trusted advisor, you must be viewed as a peer. In my last post I talked about the importance of demonstrating Professional Acumen. In this post I set out the “C-suite” Behaviors you need to exemplify if you want to be accepted as a peer by senior executives, and I describe the importance of Values Alignment for top executives.

A top CEO headhunter told me once about a candidate for a senior job that he had all but turned down  just by spying him in the reception area of his Manhattan offices. He said, “The candidate had only been there for a few minutes, and he was sitting quietly on the couch. That told me right away that he probably didn’t have the C-Suite mindset—the confidence needed to operate at the level the job required. CEO candidates don’t sit and wait—they stand. That way, when you walk in to pick them up and take them back to your office, they are not in an inferior or supplicant position. Most of them do this without even thinking about it. When I walk out and they are standing, the relationship starts on a peer level.” Trivial? Not at all. Clients look at these subtle behavioral clues and make judgments very rapidly. Here are some of the behaviors you need to manifest if you want to establish senior-level, peer client relationships:

A willingness to challenge your client. I call this “selfless independence” in my book Clients for Life. A division president at a major bank once told me, “I divide all the advisors I use into two groups: Those who simply do what I say, and those who will push back and sometimes say ‘No.’ A few of these latter individuals are my trusted advisors. The others are really suppliers.”  Remember, if you’re concerned about coming across as too challenging, try turning your statements into questions. Instead of “I don’t think your team is collaborating very well” try “How do you feel about the collaboration within your team?” You’ll create more buy-in that way.

An attitude that establishes equality. If you keep thanking your client, over and over again, for “taking so much of their valuable time to meet with you,” what does that convey? Better would be, “I’m delighted we were able to meet today. Thank you.”

Confident body language. In an interview for one of my books, a CEO told me, “If you walk into a client’s office with your head held high, there’s always the chance that you’ll get knocked down a notch. That’s a small risk. But if you go in on your knees, no client will ever, ever lift you up.” If you are anxious or nervous when you meet with a senior client, or if your body language betrays anything less than a belief that you belong in the room with that executive, it’s unlikely you’ll be viewed as a peer.

Showing courage. Do you fold your tent at the slightest provocation, or do you hold your ground? What if a prospect is acting bored and unengaged, and basically sending the message that they have no interest whatsoever in talking to you. You might ask, “I’m curious, why did you accept this the invitation to meet up? Did you have a particular issue in mind for our discussion?” Or, “We’ve got another 20 minutes scheduled for our meeting this morning. How can I be helpful to you during this time?” If a prospect tells you, “We have no need for what you do. There’s not a lot to talk about right now” you might respond with “You’d be surprised how many of my best clients today told me that when we first met. Do you mind if I ask you a question…?”

Values Alignment

If a client is hiring a vendor, it’s certainly important that they believe the vendor to be honest, fair, and that they subscribe to ethical and legal behaviors. They may even want that vendor to reflect important priorities for the client, such as supporting diversity or sustainability. But the client won’t be hugely concerned with having a deep understanding of the specific values of the individuals who work with that supplier. Fundamentally it’s a relatively arm’s-length relationship, and more institutional than personal. In contrast, if an executive is drawing someone into their inner circle, they are going to be looking for serious alignment of individual values and beliefs. These go well beyond the basics of integrity—they might include a client’s sense of your:

• Authenticity
• Ambition
• Outlook (Optimistic? Pessimistic?)
• Risk propensity
• Action bias
• Relationship orientation
• View of human nature
• Willingness to be a contrarian or to go against the grain
• Political or religious beliefs (possibly!)

And so on.

You cannot manufacture a set of values and beliefs to match those of your client. But you can be open about what you stand for and what’s important to you. You want your clients to sense these things and be attracted to them. The chemistry and fit won’t always be there, but if you’re overly buttoned down and keep your cards too close to your chest, your clients won’t even get the chance to know you. And, you’ll come across as anodyne and bland.

Finally, you have to believe you are a peer. You have to believe you belong in your top client’s corner office. You must possess a strong sense of your own value and your ability to help your clients improve and grow their business. That deep belief in yourself and what what you have to offer will by itself go very far towards creating the peer relationship you desire.

To summarize: You will be treated like a peer by senior executives when you:

First, demonstrate professional acumen. This includes experience, expertise, knowledge breadth, judgment, and insight

Second, exemplify C-Suite behaviors, such as a willingness to challenge your client, confident body language, courage under fire, and a general attitude of equality.

Third, are perceived as sharing important values and beliefs with your client.

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Andrew Sobel helps companies and individuals build 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 to Build Peer Relationships with Your Clients (Part 2) 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.

I often run workshops on ‘working the room’ and I am always being asked how to make myself more memorable at networking events. In this post, I share 5 ways of helping you be more memorable when working the room.

Help people remember your name at business networking events

When you introduce yourself, say your first name, pause slightly, and then say your first and second name. For example:

“My name is Heather…. Heather Townsend”

The fact that the other person gets to hear your name twice, significantly increases the chances of them remembering your name.

If your name is slightly unusual, or from a foreign culture or background, a way to help people remember your name, is to give them an easy way to say it. For example, many french people struggle to say my name as they don’t have the ‘th’ sound in their language:

“My name is Heather…. Heather Townsend… it rhymes with …. or sounds like …. or use my nick name …”

Introduce yourself by the value you bring and the clients you work for

Introducing yourself by your job title is the best way of stopping a conversation before it has really started.

Therefore, don’t say:

• “I’m in tax“, say “I help my manufacturing clients pay the legal & ethical minimum amount of tax“
• “I’m in business restructuring” say “I help creditors get as much as possible of what they are owed“

Download our free joined up networking tool kit for help to write your introduction. (email required)

Add in relationship hooks

The trick to making yourself memorable is to show more of your personality than just your name and rank, and an exchange of pleasantries and small talk. When you are exchanging pleasantries, then aim to drop in some relationship hooks for the other person to catch. For example, when asked:

• ‘How was your journey here?‘, how about answering: “An easy journey and I’m hoping that the M25 behaves itself on the way home” 
• ‘How has your day been?‘, how about answering: “Lovely day and got some juicy new assignments given to me today” or “great day, but now looking forward to an evening out with my wife“

Have some prepared ‘credibility stories’

Credibility stories are where you have several war stories prepared which illustrate the length and breadth of what you do, and who you do it for, and the results you help your clients achieve. Stories are naturally more memorable than a bland list of what you do and who you do it for.

Send them an email after the event to say how much you enjoyed speaking to them

It amazes me how many people fail to follow up after a networking event. Seriously. Just by sending them a short email saying how much you enjoyed meeting them, you will instantly become more memorable.

For a free guide to building your own personal networking strategy, (email required), click here.

How do you help yourself be more memorable when networking?

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 ways to make yourself more memorable at business networking events appeared first on Big4.com.

Once you have acquired a new client, the next challenge is to create a personal connection and deepen the relationship. The right power questions will help you do this.  I like to ask what I call Passion questions and Depth questions.

Passion questions help you understand what the other person is really excited about in life. They enable you to learn what gets them up in the morning. For example, “Why do you do what you do?” is an excellent passion question. It’s simple but profound. Ask it and then be quiet—if you have the patience to allow the answer to emerge, it may surprise you. Here are some other Passion questions that you can use with clients:

• “What is the most fulfilling part of your work?”
• “Outside of your work, what has given you the greatest fulfillment?”
• “What do you like most about your job?”
• “What’s something you’ve always wanted to do…but never had the time for?”
• “If you hadn’t gone into…(business, law, etc) what do you think you would have done?”
• “What has been your greatest accomplishment?”
• “What would you say has been the happiest day of your life?”
• “You’ve achieved so much in your career—what else would you like to accomplish?”
• “If you didn’t have to work or earn money, what do you think you would do?”

Depth questions are questions that help you learn more about the person—his or her career, experiences, personal life, expertise, influences, and so on. The simplest depth question is, “How did you get started?” I was once at an awards dinner, and found myself talking with the CEO of WalMart USA. He had one million employees reporting to him! Did I try to show him that I was smart? Tell him all about my books? No! He was born in South America, and I simply asked, “How did you get your start? How did you get from the small town you were raised in to being CEO?” He smiled when I asked this, and talked passionately about his career and life story. The subsequent conversation lasted 45 minutes, and we connected in a very personal, intimate way.

Other Depth questions include:

• “If you could go back and give advice to your younger self about succeeding professionally and in life, what would you say to them?”
• “Who have been influential mentors or role models to you?”
• “What was the biggest turning point in your career?”
• “What would you say was your most important developmental experience?”

Here are some other power questions that I have found useful in building trusted relationships with clients:

1. If you sense the other person is disengaged or distracted: “What’s the most important thing we should be talking about this morning?”
2. If you have gotten a conversation off on the wrong foot entirely: “Do you mind if we start over?” (This also works beautifully if you’ve started arguing with your spouse or partner!)
3. To get someone to reflect on their role and their effectiveness in it: “What parts of your job do you wish you could spend more time on, and which parts do you wish you could deemphasize or stop doing?”

Be bold! Remember that many of the greatest figures in history were inveterate question-askers: Socrates, Jesus, Newton, Einstein, and Drucker, just to name a few.

What has helped you deepen your client relationships and get to know your clients as people? 

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Andrew Sobel helps companies and individuals build 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 Questions to Help You Deepen Your Client Relationships appeared first on Big4.com.

In this blog, Heather explores the problems that many aspiring partners face – how to get their partners to see the need for change in the firm’s marketing and general business development processes, systems and practices.

This is not an unusual problem – and I see it happening all the time. You have a keen director or senior manager wanting to build their own client portfolio. They still want to be seen as one of the club, but can see that there are newer and more effective ways of marketing the practice. How to make their partners sit up and take notice, without alienating them?

Partnerships tend not to respond well to revolution. Therefore, don’t try and convince your partners that they need to change everything over night. All this will tend to do is make them either get defensive, or dismiss you out of hand. After all, they want the proof that your ideas will work better. (Very often the detailed proof is not what you have.)

Your numbers and results, initially, need to do the talking for you. What I mean by this is gain permission to set up a trial or pilot for what you want to do. You may need to seek forgiveness and start something up without permission just to get it going. One of my favourite managing partners told me that the rest of her partners really sat up and took notice of what she was doing on social media after she brought in a £100k+ client. This is what I mean by letting your results do the talking for you. Another of my friends who is a future managing partner of her firm started her own blog and Twitter account without the rest of her partner’s knowing. She had some explaining to do when they found out – but by then she also had concrete evidence to show the value of what she was doing. Her managing partner is now using Twitter as a result of her actions.

Many of the more traditional practices are dragging their feet when it comes to really committing to marketing by sector. This doesn’t stop you externally and internally growing a reputation for a niche specialism. Yes, your client portfolio may only contain 10-15% of clients who fit your ‘niche’, but over time your reputation will develop and this proportion will grow. (Read here for advice on adopting a niche) When you start to be classed as a rainmaker for your practice, your partners will be keen to understand how you are doing this. This is NOW the time to suggest a few changes to the way the practice markets itself.

You may find our FREE guide to surviving your firm’s politics and FREE assertiveness self assessment and FREE guide to being more assertive useful in this situation.)

If you find that your partners still don’t appreciate how you are going about doing things – even though you are bringing in new clients with your marketing methods, then are you in the right firm for you for the future? The good thing about this strategy is that you will be far more valuable to another firm if you come with a client following…

To help you with your marketing, you may like to download our free (email required) step-by-step guide to writing marketing plan

How have you helped your partners change their marketing and sales processes and systems?

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 How do I help my partners embrace different ways of marketing? 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:

In this post, Heather shows you that it is possible to build up a network which helps you win business without compromising on your evenings with the family. How does Heather know this is possible? That’s how she personally built up a six-figure client portfolio…

Although networking events happen at all times of day, very often it is expected that you will network after work (i.e. on your own time). But what if you don’t want to be networking in the evening? For example, because you have a young family, or you have hobbies outside of work which you need your evenings for?

My answer to this conundrum is definitely not. When I say the word networking, what image pops into your head? I’m guessing you are thinking about an event which you have had to go OUT to, which will contain a room full of strangers. It doesn’t need to be this way. I will now explain why…

Networking is the process you use to find, build and maintain a mutually beneficial network. There are many different networking tools out there which remove the necessity for evening networking. For example:

1. Make use of events and groups which meet over breakfast, coffee or lunch.

Networking events happen over breakfast, coffee, lunch and afternoon tea. Do your research and see whether there is a group or regular networking event which works for your availability.

Download our free joined up networking tool kit, with plans, templates and lots of stuff to help you network effectively – whatever the time of day. (email required)

2. Use online networking to ‘find’ people for your network

Most social networking sites and communities are searchable. This means that from the luxury of your desk, and at a time convenient to you, you can converse with the people you want to meet when networking. The best way to harness sites such as LinkedIn is to set up daily and weekly routines to both interact with the right kind of people, but also spending time to find out where they hang out.

Download our free guide to building your networking strategy to help you decide where and how you will network to win business. (email required)

3. Be pro-active in deepening your relationships

Chatting with your network on-line is one thing, but if you never move away from small talk, then it is unlikely that you will get much benefit from the chatting. Therefore, work out who you want to ask to have a phone call with and spend time chatting with them, so it feels very natural to progress to a phone call.

4. Don’t neglect the internal network

Remember that partners and senior professionals in your firm are most likely going to be the 1st referrals for you. Make sure you include your internal firm network in your networking strategy. See also, 6 reasons why you must not neglect your internal network if you want to get to partner.

How do you network without going out in the evenings?

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.

The post How to network effectively without going out in the evening 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 Tim Reed, Big4.com Guest Blogger   

Organizations today are  facing a number of new challenges and opportunities related to the deployment and use of Big Data concepts, processes and technology. A number of trends and key directions are starting to develop, creating the main focus areas that business and IT leadership should consider as they approach deploying and operating Big Data for their organization.

Leveraging Data

One of the keys to effectively leveraging and realizing the value of Big Data is to understand  some of  the approaches you need to take. Whether you are trying to get closer to your customers or to your business, points to consider include:

• Aggregate – What are the standards or principals you need to apply to efficiently and effectively drive aggregation? Look at whether you have setup the standards and controls so aggregation is not just efficient, but also cost effective.

• Organize – Have you organized your approach to Data in a way that benefits your customer and your organization?  Most organizations have not considered using external validations, such as webex based customer seminars or Google analytics that look at sales data.

• Apply - What are you doing to apply the data and tools required to succeed in this space? One consideration is looking at the tools you are using today and considering how you can drive consolidation and savings, in order to fund a new focus on Big Data and analytics.

Delivering Products that matter

The approach you take will not make a difference if you do not have a grounded view or strategic vision to where you want to go. The key trends and focus areas we are seeing today include:

• Support Collaboration – Using Big Data to support collaboration, both internal and customer focused.

• Drive Analysis – Improving analysis and the current approaches are myriad. Spotting patterns in data and framing relevant analysis is more evident. Using new tools such as semantic data toolsets, Hadoop and Cloud Services provide new analysis capabilities and opportunities.

• Increase Efficiency – Look at the new products you are going to deliver. Are they able to increase the efficiency of your customer services or will the products improve the internal services you provide?

Big Data Tools

The opportunities related to using the tools of Big Data may not be evident. The world of mainframe computing and using ETL to address massive amounts of data has changed.  Take a look to see if you can use tools like Hadoop to drive savings. Are you able to reduce of eliminate ETL (extract, transfer, load) altogether? Can the new tools reduce mainframe costs?  How about embracing open source tools and see how you could replace Unix with Linux? Using the new tools of Big Data could provide the platform for innovation, consolidating databases and driving significant efficiencies.

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).  Working for multiple global firms, the ReedITC Team  has led several  IT and Operational initiatives, including Data and Enterprise Cloud Transformations. For more information, please visit www.reeditc.com or contact tim.reed@reeditc.com

The post Big Data, Big Opportunities appeared first on Big4.com.

To become a client’s trusted advisor, you must be viewed as a peer. This doesn’t mean you have to become a literal peer. If you work with a CEO, for example, you will never be their strict peer in an organizational or hierarchical sense. But if you want a seat at the table with them, they need to consider you as a peer in three areas: Professional acumen, behavior, and values. Let’s look at what these are and how you demonstrate them. In this blog I will cover point one, Professional Acumen. 

Acumen is, literally, “the ability to make good judgments and take quick decisions.” Clients want a peer who can partner with them to solve their toughest problems, capture opportunities, and achieve their goals. More broadly, I would define professional acumen as a valuable combination of five qualities:

Experience: Your client needs reassurance that you’ve addressed this same issue many times before, most likely in their specific industry and/or function. Or, that you have other, related experience that will provide a new and different perspective.

Can you frame your experience in a compelling and relevant way?

Expertise: Most of your clients are going to have expertise in your same specialty. In some cases they may know less than you, in others they may be equally or more expert.

Do you focus on your expertise and methodologies too early in your client conversations? Can you show, at the right moment, how it applies to your client’s most critical issues?

Knowledge Breadth: Senior executives in particular will look for a peer advisor who has in-depth expertise AND knowledge breadth. They want someone who understands the interrelationships between different parts of their business–someone who has an enterprise-wide perspective.

In addition to talking about the specific, presenting problem that your client has, are you able to have broad-based conversations with them about their business issues?

Judgment: Clients face more strategic and operational choices than ever before. You establish yourself as a peer when you demonstrate your ability to discern between different courses of action and to help your client make tough decisions. Commodity experts and advisors make judgments differently. Experts combine facts and experience to make a decision. Advisors combine facts, experience, and a deep understanding of their client’s values, beliefs, and organizational capabilities as they recommend decisions.

Insight. Insight means having a strong sense of perception. That is, seeing issues clearly and being able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Insight leads to idea generation and innovation, which are treasured by clients.

Are you learning enough about your client’s actual business to be able to make incisive observations about potential improvements? Are you working hard to see knowledge connections and possible analogies from related fields?

All five of these qualities add up to the intellectual strength—the professional acumen—that senior clients look for in a peer relationship with an outside advisor or service provider.

What are your own challenges in developing your professional acumen? How has it helped you with clients?

(In my next blog post I will address the second ingredient of peer relationships: C-Suite Behavior).

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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 to Build Peer Relationships with Your Clients 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:

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.

Comprehensively reviewing your organization will deliver critical information on its fundamental strengths and challenges and point you to necessary improvements; whether you are a large or small operating unit, department or entire organization – for profit, non-profit or governmental.

Reasons for conducting an organization improvement assessment include:

• You are a new director or manager and want a comprehensive understanding of your organization’s strengths, weaknesses and problems, including the factors that are causing them; and find out that which needs to be fixed, as well as that which doesn’t need your immediate attention.
• Your organization has been experiencing a variety of problems and you want to get an overall understanding of your organization before you decide on the next steps. You want be sure that when you start to make improvements you are solving the real problems, rather than their manifestations.
• You want to know what is currently working well and not working so well.  For those areas not performing as well as you would like you want to know what is hindering performance.
• You want to know the underlying reasons for organizational problems or issues, so that effective solutions can be implemented;  and also how effectively operations can be replicated in other areas of the organization.
• Customers and/or competitors are driving a need to change and improve.
• Your organization is among the best and you want to make sure it continues to excel
• You are considering a strategic partnership with another organization and want to be sure about your organization’s strengths and weaknesses before entering into discussions and negotiations with the other organization.
• You may be absorbing another organization and want a thorough understanding of how well it is operating.

To see and use the tool go to:  http://www.advancingyourorganization.com/?page_id=1106

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

The post We’ve Updated Our Comprehensive Organization Assessment and Improvement Tool 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.

THE FULL ANALYSIS IS DOWNLOADABLE HERE

2012 was a banner year for the Big Four accounting firms: Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young (E&Y), KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) following strong growth in 2011, and erasing the impacts of subdued performance of 2009 and 2010. 2009 combined revenue for the four firms of $94 billion fell 7% from 2008’s record of $101 billion, but stabilized in 2010 as revenue increased 1.4% to $95 billion. 2011 revenue rose a further 9% to historic high levels of $103 billion, setting a new record.
Another new record was set in 2012, with strong growth momentum in all service lines and geographies continuing from 2011, helped by emerging countries, improvements in global economic profiles and increased business deal activity. Combined 2012 revenue for the four firms rose to a record historic high level of $110 billion, up 6% from 2011. With all global economies, except those in Europe, showing continued growth in 2012, the Big Four firms had outstanding performance in 2012, with revenues rising in all geographies, service lines and industries.

KPMG revenues grew the slowest at 1.4%, Ernst & Young at 6.7%, PwC increased 7.8% and Deloitte posted the highest rate at 8.6%. PwC grew slower than Deloitte yet reported 2012 revenues of $31.5 billion, just $200 million more than Deloitte, thus maintaining its leadership position as the largest accounting firm on the planet.
KPMG’s modest growth is well out of line with peers. Our analysis shows three factors: Europe is 50% of global revenues and was negatively impacted by US dollar appreciation versus the Euro, Advisory service line had modest growth and Audit presumably lost some relative market share.

In terms of geography, Americas have 40% and falling share of global combined revenues. From 2011 to 2012 however, Americas had a strong performance growth of 9.2%. Europe has 43% of combined firm revenues and increased 3.3% from 2011 to 2012, growing the slowest due to regional uncertainty. Asian revenues have more than doubled from $7 billion in 2004 to $18.5 billion in 2012, 17% of the total, and grew a strong 8.0% from 2011 to 2012.
By service line, Audit accounts for 45% of total revenues and grew 2.9% from 2011 to 2012. Tax services are 23% of total revenues and also rose 5.6% from 2011 to 2012. Advisory services have been the fastest growing service line for several years increasing share from 22% of total revenues in 2004 to 33% in 2012. Advisory revenues grew a strong 12.2% from 2011 to 2012.

The Big Four firms cumulatively employ more than 690,000 staff globally, with a total of 37,000 partners overseeing a steep pyramid of about 530,000 professionals. Net employment increased by 39,000 from 2011 to 2012.

The outlook for 2013 and beyond is quite optimistic, revenue is expected to grow at a good pace, with help from strong emerging markets, Advisory services, Dodd-Frank and other regulations, conversions to IFRS and favorable economic conditions. 2013 will also prove whether PwC can continue to be the leader and whether KPMG can attempt to narrow its gap with E&Y.

For the analysis page, please go to http://www.big4.com/analysis

The post Just Released and Must Read! 2012 Big Four Firms Performance Analysis 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.

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.

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:

LinkedIn is probably the only social network where you can bump into senior corporate decision makers and professional intermediaries. 

Events are no longer supported

LinkedIn switched off events at the end of November. This means you can no longer publicise your event using the old event application.

Applications are no longer supported with the new profiles

This means that you can no longer share your blog, documents, presentations or video clips via google apps, box.net or slideshare within your LinkedIn profile. However, LinkedIn is slowly rolling out the feature where you can embed rich media, such as presentations, documents, video clips within three sections of your Linkedin profile – your summary, experience and education section. Effectively, you can add in a link to the media content that you want to share within your LinkedIn profile.

Profile has been rejigged and refreshed

This is mostly a cosmetic update to the LinkedIn profiles. However, instead of your profile being one big block where you can move around all the different sections, there are now several different sections and you can only move the sub-sections around in the sections.

The sections are now (in order): Activity, Background, Recommendations, Connections, Groups and Following.

LinkedIn has integrated your recommendations into the experience section and shows the two recommendations at the top of the list for each role you have added on LinkedIn.

The recommendations still all appear at the bottom of your profile, but only the top 5 on the list are automatically shown, you have to expand the rest of the section to see the rest of the recommendations you choose to show.

With recommendations now being relegated to the bottom of the LinkedIn profile the endorsements that you receive for your skills and achievements are now very important. This is the 1st snapshot people looking at your profile will see of your externally verified credibility.

And the final change to the actual LinkedIn profile, is the specialities part of the summary has now been removed.

Ability to embed rich media in your profile

This is a big change to the functionality of LinkedIn. It is also a major opportunity to see your Linkedin profile as the start a journey someone takes to find out about you and your firm – be they prospective client or recruiter. Before you whizz in and start embedding documents and videos left, right and centre, it is worth taking a step back and thinking about what media items you can use to showcase your expertise or lead the reader on a journey to discover more about you.

For example, these are things which possible on the new LinkedIn profiles:

• embed links to published articles
• embed links to landing pages on your website and blog, allowing you to customise the pathway that a visitor from LinkedIn takes to your website
• embed links to white papers, guides and templates which help to educate and inform your prospects and clients
• video clips introducing yourself and your firm, or even you being interviewed on a topic

Network statistics

LinkedIn now provides an infographic of your network on your profile. This means that you can click on your connections profiles and see where they have large clusters of people that they know from the same industry, school, location or company. If you would like help with how to win business via your network, how about downloading our free (email required) guide to building your personal networking strategy?

What do you need to do as a result of these changes?

1. Request the new profile if you haven’t already got it.
2. Take a long hard look at the recommendations you have received on LinkedIn and make sure that the most important ones are in the top 5 on the list for each of your roles.
3. Consider whether to add in some more roles, so you can segment the documents, presentations etc so the reader of your profile can easily verify your credibility and expertise.
4. Decide on what parts of your ‘story’ you will share presentations, videos, website links to to help strengthen your credibility
5. Decide on what landing pages you will direct visitors from LinkedIn too on your website, via embedded links.
6. Take note of critical content which you are currently sharing on LinkedIn profiles via the Box.net, Google Apps, Slideshare applications and make plans to share this content within the new LinkedIn profile
7. Add in skills to your profile
8. Start going into LinkedIn daily and participating, as your activity on LinkedIn is now given far greater prominence on your profile.

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 8 changes to LinkedIn that you need to know about 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.

Team A are the crowd evangelists, those for whom the power of the many, collective insights and collaborative innovation represent a new highly effective and powerful tool for informed decision making and innovation.

Team B are the sceptics who will vehemently argue that group think, poor insight and inaccurate data/decisions are the true output of crowdsourcing.

Taking these two viewpoints and overlaying expertise is genuinely interesting (at least for me!).

Let’s consider an organisational crowd, a group of a few hundred people across a company, who represent each part of the company and a cross section of seniority, tenure and of course expertise. The company looks to source ideas to a complex challenge the business is facing in its engineering division. The business throws this challenge out to all employees.

The most popular ideas are in favour of Team B not feasible or practical for the business. They are too expensive, not really addressing the issue (it was complex after all) or have already been tried and failed. However, one suggestion, relatively poorly described is seen by a member of the engineering team and it sparks an idea in his mind. He feedbacks and branches the idea out, bringing others in. (Team A are feeling pretty happy all of a sudden!). However, this team member is a pretty junior member of the team, not recognised as a particular expert in his field (see Gladwells 10K hours).

Does this matter- of course not! The idea is surfaced, it develops and proves a huge success. Our junior engineer’s reputation in this area grows too, and the whole organisation shared in this.

The conclusion, at least in my mind, is a practical one. Taken at face value the arguments of A & B have merit, but embracing systems and process to truly engage a wide group in the ideas development process, evolving input and learning expertise can and does derive value, as this account bears testament to!

Simon Hill is CEO and co-founder of Wazoku, an idea software company, an Associate Director with the Venture Capital Firm FindInvestGrow and an active member of the London technology and entrepreneurial community. Simon is an alumni of PWC, Deloitte and Cap Gemini.

The post Experts in a digital age: The expert in the crowd 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.)

*********************************************

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 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.

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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.

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In response to increased scrutiny from Boards, Revenue Authorities and other regulators, many businesses are now formally documenting their indirect tax strategy and implementing formal processes to evaluate and approve planning ideas.

For leading companies, a tax strategy is a dynamic framework that is shaped by internal and external drivers.

A tax strategy should cover all key taxes and business locations and should be aligned to the overall business strategy.

Potential Benefits Of A Documented Indirect Tax Strategy Include:

1. Obtaining clarity around the business’ indirect tax risk appetite, which should facilitate the identification of planning opportunities appropriate to the business’ wider commercial objectives
2. Providing the business with a consistent and efficient review and evaluation process over tax-related matters
3. Raising the profile of Indirect Tax with key business and Finance stakeholders
4. Monitoring and strengthening governance procedures in decentralized and overseas jurisdictions
5. Identifying improvements in indirect tax-related systems, processes and controls
6. Identifying areas where additional indirect tax resources or funding may be required

To challenge the Indirect Tax Function’s short and long term business plan objectives the site contains a roadmap of an ‘Indirect Tax Strategic Plan’ and includes examples of ‘Setting the Objectives Of The Tax Function’.

Tax Control Framework

Tax Control Framework forms an integral part of an organisation’s Business or Internal Control Framework, ensuring that the organisation’s processes have been structured so that the tax risks or potential savings become visible on time.

Download

Proving The Reliability Of Accounting Records For Tax Purposes

The New Trend might be to have a more open dialogue between revenue bodies, taxpayers, and tax intermediaries. The at times prolonged operational audits performed by the tax authorities seem to be turning into a thing of the past.

Initiatives Of Tax Authorities

• In 2005, the Netherlands Tax and Customs Administration (TCA) initiated a pilot ‘horizontal monitoring’ programme involving 20 of the country’s largest corporate taxpayers
• In 2005, the United States initiated a Compliance Assurance Process
• In September 2005, the Irish Revenue Commissioners initiated their ‘Co- operative Compliance’ programme with large corporate taxpayers.
• Budget 2009, Senior Accounting Officer sign off in the United Kingdom
• GST Assisted Compliance Assurance Programme (ACAP) in Singapore

We refer also to OECD promotion of ‘enhanced relationship’ (OECD report: Study into the Role of Tax Intermediaries). Even if the authorities have not embraced such an approach (yet), a proactive mode can not only safe time and money but result in a good relationship.

With the arrival of horizontal supervision the Netherlands, combined with the use of audit samples and data analyses, businesses can prove the reliability of their accounting records for tax purposes themselves, which offers the opportunity to avoid supplementary tax assessments and penalties.

The following benefits may be realised if VAT pre-audits are performed using, among other things, data analyses and audit-sample techniques:

1. Improved relations with the Tax Inspector (evidently, by using audit techniques similar to those used by the Tax Office, the first hurdle in any future discussions about the outcome of an audit is already taken).
2. Businesses obtain an understanding of the nature and scope of their tax risks in a statistically reliable, quick and efficient way.
3. The quality of the assessment of procedures performed by external auditors will increase, because they will have to spend less time on assessing risks in the tax chapter in the fields of, for instance, indirect taxes, payroll tax and national insurance contributions.
4. Less “vertical” audits and lower costs to be incurred on using business resources for such audits
5. Lower penalties

Statistical Sampling

Statistical Sampling is the tax audit methodology of the Dutch Tax Authorities and it can be used by companies for proactive audit defense: pre-audit and detective control resulting in quantification of potential amount of exposures and/or savings.

By identifying risks respectively opportunities, an action plan pertaining to both the future and the past may be drawn up to mitigate these risks or realize savings.

Data Analytics

An alternative for performing an efficient tax audit would be data analysis. Data-analysis options have increased and been refined rapidly over the past few years, allowing for large data volumes to be reviewed in an effective and efficiently way. Besides, data analyses can usually be performed using the same software tool as that used to statistical sampling.

Example of executive summary of data analytics – scope both savings as risks evaluation (source: KEY Group)

Download

Management Of Legislative Change

By The KEY Group specialized in ‘Business Control, ‘Information Technology’ and ‘Indirect Tax Performance’

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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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“

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In short, idea management is the process of finding great ideas and then making them happen.

Idea management puts a structure to the process of collecting and capturing ideas within an organisation or community. It provides a central place where ideas are stored and can then be evaluated and analysed. The best ones are then chosen to be developed further – and hopefully be implemented and become reality.

By using innovation software you can ensure that ideas don’t get lost and that the best ideas can be identified and developed. However, innovation software is only as good as your business processes and engagement with the tool. Make sure you implement processes to support the tool and set goals for what you want to achieve by using it. The overall goal should be to help foster a culture of open innovation, with all employees encouraged to contribute: where feedback is open and honest, good ideas are nurtured and talent recognised.

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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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Maureen Broderick

Broderick, Big4.com Guest Blogger

“The fundamentals of the professional service business are brutally simple; it’s about talent, it’s about clients, and it’s about teaming to bring it all together to create and deliver value.”  Jim Quigley, former CEO, Deloitte

Operating a professional service firm (PSF) is very different from running a product-based business. Infrastructures, governance, talent management, compensation, and profitability vary significantly from traditional corporate environments. Firm leaders will tell you that managing a successful PSF is a challenging business that requires a delicate balance between structure and autonomy and a unique leadership style.  Not to mention the enormous challenge of managing an organization of extremely smart, highly autonomous, and somewhat quirky professionals. It’s definitely not a job for the faint of heart.

In researching my new book, The Art of Managing Professional Services, my team conducted more than 130 in-depth interviews with leaders of the world’s top firms. What emerged were their proven practices on how to tackle the ten critical areas that firm leaders must monitor to build and maintain a strong organization: vision, values, and culture; people; clients; services; finance; positioning; partnership; strategy; structure; and leadership style.

To keep the firm operating at maximum strength, leadership must constantly monitor and tinker with each of these critical pieces of the organizational puzzle. But even the best firms in the business can find themselves out of alignment at certain periods in their life cycle. And virtually all of the leaders interviewed admitted that many areas of their organization need attention and improvement (to test your firm’s performance on the 10 critical areas, see Management Questions to Ponder). The key is maintaining a vigilant focus on the firm’s vision, values, and culture – the anchor and core of every successful professional service firm.

1. Vision, Values and Culture“For a professional service firm, vision, values, and culture are really 99 percent of the equation.”  Damien O’Brien, CEO, Egon Zehnder InternationalThe leaders of the professional service firms interviewed were passionate about their firms’ values and culture. Values are the bedrock of the organization – the rules that govern behavior toward colleagues, clients, and the communities in which they serve. In successful firms, adherence to the values is cultivated and rewarded; failure to comply can result in expulsion. The organizations we studied devote an enormous amount of time and resources to embedding their values and reinforcing their culture. In fact, the leaders we interviewed agree that the preservation and nurturing of their firm’s vision, values and culture is their number one job.
2. People“Creating an environment where people with very different backgrounds and skills feel that they can have a successful career is essential.”  Dennis Nally, Global Chairman, PwCYou might expect that professional services would be good at talent management. After all, people are the product. Without committed, highly skilled people, there is nothing to sell. Some impressive best practices emerged in our discussions, but perhaps the most important lesson is that people are treated with respect. Their opinions are valued, they are trusted to interact with clients early on in their careers, and their contributions are expected and rewarded. Successful firms invest significantly in recruiting, career management, training and mentoring of their professionals.
3. Portfolio“If you’re serving the wrong clients, you don’t have a chance for success.”  Bill Hermann, Former Managing Partner, Plante & MoranFor PSFs, 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. The client base helps shape a firm’s brand and has a powerful influence on its reputation and standing in the marketplace. The best-run firms follow five steps to effectively manage the client cycle from concept through acquisition, retention, and renewal. The cycle begins with strategically planning and regularly reviewing the client mix. As clients come on board, they are carefully introduced into the firm and are nurtured and managed 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.

4. Services“Without productization, intellectual capital just builds brand; it doesn’t create a new service portfolio.”  Stephen Rhinesmith, former Senior Partner, Oliver WymanIf talent is the lifeblood of a firm, then an effective service portfolio strategy represents the arteries through which that talent is channeled – and innovation keeps the whole system healthy and energized. Firm leaders agree that successfully managing service development and renewal is a continuous cycle of activities that begins with a portfolio review to identify gaps and retire services that are no longer relevant. It continues with ideation, the often complex task of stimulating and capturing new ideas. The next step is selecting the best candidates for development. And finally, ideas are transformed into viable service offerings, the troops are trained on delivery, and the services are launched. Gathering and sharing knowledge and client experiences is integral to the ongoing success of a service strategy. Each step of the cycle is important in creating a consistent engine of innovation.

5. Finance“Financial management is the bedrock. You can’t be successful if you don’t end up with competitive earnings, whatever metrics you use.”  Steve Harty, North American Chairman, BBHOn the surface, professional services seem like simple businesses to manage financially.  As one leader told us, “It’s mostly a time and materials business driven by rates, revenue, utilization, realization, and expenses.”  But there are nuances that make it challenging. In the short-term project-based PSF environment it is almost impossible for many firm leaders to see beyond the window of a few months, which makes revenue forecasting a distinct challenge. The top firms have a clearly articulated financial strategy that establishes revenue and earnings goals, and responsibilities for financial performance. They are rigorous at tracking key financial metrics – both lagging and leading indicators – and invest in the people and the analytical tools that provide timely, action-oriented financial information. Cash flow is king, as one CEO told us, “If a firm has cash, it’s a well run place. If they don’t, it isn’t.”

6. Positioning“Your brand is the place you occupy in the consciousness of your constituents.”  Frank Burch, Chairman, DLA Piper Global BoardIn professional services, positioning is what you stand for. Positioning defines what the firm does, how it does it and why it is different from other organizations. To succeed, a PSF must identify a credible position to occupy in the market. Determining positioning involves decisions on a number of fronts. Will you be a lower cost/higher volume provider or will you offer high cost, unique solutions to unique problems? What specific services will you sell? Which segments, geographies, companies and buyers will you target? What is the service experience the firm will create for the client? The best firms know who they are and what they do and are masters at communicating their positioning both internally to staff and externally to their market.

7. Partnership“There has to be a lot more than money to hold a group of very smart, type-A partners together.”  Evan Chesler, Presiding Partner, Cravath, Swaine & MooreThe term partnership has a very special meaning in professional services. Much more than a type of ownership structure, the concept of partnership is both an industry mindset – a core belief that everyone is in it together, united by a common vision and cause – and a distinctive set of governance characteristics. A successful partnership-driven governance model is based on shared values, collaboration and teamwork, peer relationships, highly participatory decision making, and equity sharing with partner/owners.

8. Strategy“We spend a lot of time, as a management team, just making sure we are aligned in our ambition.” Steve Gunby, former Chairman, North and South America, The Boston Consulting GroupSome view strategic planning as an art, some as a science – and some as an inspired combination of the two. Firm leaders described their strategic planning processes as everything from intensive brainstorming marathons over weeks or even months to routine annual budget exercises. The best firms view strategic planning as a continuous cycle, not a one-time event. Long-term strategic plans are integrated with annual plans and progress is regularly reviewed and communicated to all stakeholders.
9. Structure“We really hate bureaucracy. That is why we are pretty flat and there is not a lot of politics happening here.”  Donna Imperato, President and CEO, Cohn and WolfeThe choice of the organizational structure and governance model has critical implications for professional service firms. Together they form the internal architecture of a firm – the invisible scaffolding that supports everything, from day-to-day operations to strategic planning and effective execution. The structure delineates the organizational layers and management reporting hierarchies within the firm. Governance is the leadership style – collaborative, dictatorial, or corporate – and the policies, systems and procedures that underpin the enterprise. Organization design choices can reinforce or undermine culture, endanger or enhance performance and service quality, and enable or diminish profitability.

10. Leadership“You’ve got to convince people with whom you are working that they want to follow your vision.”  Ben Fisher, COO, Perkins+WillOf all the ingredients in the professional service mix, leadership is probably the most essential to success – and often the most elusive. In most industries the person in the corner office calls the shots. Operating within a traditional command and control environment is relatively straightforward: the divisions between leading, managing, and following are clearly defined and widely understood. In contrast, the matrix structure that most professional service firms have embraced is a far more dynamic business model; it’s flat, fluid, fragmented, and often unruly.

We asked interviewees to describe the most important characteristics of a successful service firm leader. By a wide margin, the traits they believe define successful leadership – good influencer, listener and communicator; inspirational; passionate; visionary – fall under the umbrella of strong interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence. As one CEO summed up, “There is an under-appreciation of what it takes to lead one of these kinds of businesses – better be darn sure you want to do it.”

Maureen Broderick is founder and CEO of Broderick & Company (www.broderickco.com), a consulting firm specializing in strategy, research and training for professional services. The Art of Managing Professional Services (www.theartofmanagingprofessionalservices.com) was published in November 2010 by Wharton School Publishing.

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Robust pricing is a key to profitability, yet most professionals spend little time seriously exploring how to price their services effectively. Worse, they often underprice as they overreact to client pressure to reduce fees and become afraid they will lose the sale.

If you’re reading this, it’s likely that your work for clients is infused with deep experience, knowledge, creativity, and ideas. Would some (or all) of your clients pay a few percentage points more for your services? Under the right circumstances, some definitely would. And obviously, a small increase in price yields a disproportionately large increase in net profitability.

Here is a quick rundown of 9 possible inputs that you should consider when you establish your pricing. Some of these, like Value and Difficulty, you should most certainly also discuss with the client:

1. Value to the client. In many respects, this is a much more appropriate way to charge than using hourly rates. After all, clients seek results—value—not “bums in seats” as they say.
2. Standard market scales. In some markets, there are accepted fee or commission levels based on a percentage. Financial advisors may get 1% of assets under management per year, for example, and most executive search firms typically charge around 30% of an executive’s total annual compensation for completing a search. What I personally don’t like about this approach is that it doesn’t allow for flexibility to account for the other variables such as value or degree of risk.
3. Internal benchmarks. Many professional firms, especially consulting firms, have a target gross margin they want to achieve, and they determine pricing by working back from that goal (usually translated into daily rates, which are calculated to support the desired level of profitability).
4. Time. 
In many services markets, pricing is often based on “time and materials”—e.g., how long is it going to take us to do this? For many reasons, charging by the hour is fraught with problems, as the legal industry has discovered during the recent recession.
5. Embedded intellectual capital and/or proprietary data
. In some cases, you may have proprietary data or information that you have accumulated at great expense. There may also be physical products involved in your service delivery (training materials, for example, or software).
6. Difficulty, speed, and risk. If you take the time to explore these during the sales process, you’ll have a greater chance of earning fees commensurate with the challenge of the particular assignment.
7. Quality
. In many cases clients are willing to trade off quality for speed. Ask yourself: Are you delivering too much quality? In other words, are you doing a 120% job when 95% is going to result in a highly satisfied client? Your own perfectionism and risk aversion may be eroding your profitability!
8. Competitive offerings
. It’s great to talk about value pricing, or raising fees for very difficult work, but you also have to consider what your competition is offering to charge.
9. Value to you
. Finally, how badly do you want the work? How valuable will it be to you and your career? There are many intangible factors, such as the marquee value of the client, that might induce you to invest in building a relationship. That said, be very careful about listening to a potential client’s siren call that says, “We need a discount on this work…but look, we’re interested in a long term relationship (subtext: “Don’t worry, it’ll be worth your while!” But it rarely is in these cases).

Look carefully at your pricing strategy. If your main guide is how many hours it will take or what your competitors are charging, you’re probably missing out on significant  opportunities to strengthen your pricing. And remember: What supports higher prices is not your own assertions or calculations but rather factors like the client’s perception of the value you offer, the uniqueness of your brand, clearly-defined improvement metrics, and your ability to define the problem broadly and tie your work to the client’s highest level goals. In other words, it’s everything you do up until the moment you submit a proposal that really matters, not the quality of your negotiating skills.

How do you approach pricing, and what have you found to be effective in achieving higher fees? 

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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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Anthony Azevedo, CPA | EZCFO

Small business success is one of the fastest ways of reviving an economy and generating employment. While many might argue that large corporations employ hundreds of people; they require higher amounts of capital and take on larger amounts of risks. Small businesses on the other hand don’t require millions of dollars in financing and can be structured to survive economic downturns. However, this is not to imply that small business ownership is in any way easier than running a corporation. They are simply two different beasts and must be treated as such.

Ingredients to Business Success

Product and Service Ideas

The first step to achieving business success is having a solid idea. The idea simply needs to be profitable. In order to do that the product or service must deliver quality and provides a solution to a problem. No business can prosper unless its clients benefit.

While this concept seems simple; many new entrepreneurs neglect to pay attention to the value their prospective customers will derive from their business. Instead they rush to establish their companies. Sometimes they even hire staff without having work for them. If the owners don’t have the time or experience to write a a formal business plan they should at least write down an informal roadmap to reference in the future.

Financing

One of the greatest pitfalls of any business is liquidity. While small businesses require much less capital to set up the cash flow for both large and small businesses are equally important.

Any company starved of cash is likely to be doomed. It is always better to arrange extra capital. Be prudent about your revenues and overestimate your expenses.

Record Keeping

Record keeping is another critical factor of business success. Without adequate records, there is no proof of how much the business gained or lost over any given period. It is not only important to enter all expense and revenue transactions but to also include payroll details along with gratuity and other liabilities that come with hiring employees. Payroll accounting is also important for  tax reasons.

Record keeping is an important means of tallying the resources being spent and received from each activity of the business. This makes it easier to identify the profit and loss of a small business.

Exposure to Target Clientele

Perhaps the most decisive aspect of business success is the identification and targeting of the correct market. Before a business is launched, management should determine the client demographics.

Let’s use a daycare center as an example of business success. The target market is working moms. The business needs to identify the mom’s habits and then brainstorm how to appeal and market to them. The business could figure out where these moms spend most of their time. The owners could ask whether in the real world or virtual is the right market to spend advertising dollars. If incorrect marketing mediums are used, there will be zero penetration and the business is likely to have a very slow growth rate.

Online Presence

In this era of rapidly advancing technology, maintaining an online presence is even more important than the installation of a telephone at the office. Most consumers seek information through online sources like Facebook, email, and a multitude of websites. A business that is not online is equal to being nonexistent in the eyes of most modern consumers.

Customer Service

Customer satisfaction is as important as the product itself. It is true that a disgruntled customer complains to more people than he would otherwise, had he been satisfied with the service. So with poor customer service, the business is not only cutting ties with existing clients, but also severing relations with potential clients. It’s like committing business suicide.

New companies should be particularly wary of this as social media has the ability to rapidly transfer news from one end of the world to another. Nothing beats exceptional customer service just ask Zappos.

Anthony Azevedo was at Deloitte and currently runs EZCFO for small business success. Their motto is: Today the smartest way to do the bookkeeping and payroll for your small business is not to do it.

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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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By: Mary Werner, CPA, MOD, Big4 Guest Blogger  

“In these troubled and uncertain times, we don’t need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone’s intelligence in solving challenges and crises as they arise.”

~Margaret Wheatley

Command and control leaders. You love to hate them. These leaders are the “my way or the highway” type where the phrase “Just Do It” takes on quite a different meaning than Nike ever intended. But the reality is that this form of leadership has been the long standing default style for many leaders in our Firms and Corporations.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had the “pleasure” to work with more than a couple command and control type leaders in my years as a practicing CPA.  And my experience is consistent with the research on the negative impact of this leadership style:

No Flexibility - “My way or else.”

No Clarity  – “I only know what not to do.”

No Responsibility – “Just doing my job.”

No Commitment – “I’m just looking out for myself.”

But there is great news coming from a research study of 1,700 CEOs recently completed by IBM. The study reported that these leaders clearly see that the command and control leadership style is outdated and ineffective.

The implications are clear for the CPA profession as well. It’s time for Partners and Managers to move off this outdated and non-productive leadership style and embrace the leadership style that engages, inspires and aligns their professionals to outstanding performance and results. New behaviors can be learned and when CPA leaders see the positive impact on the bottom line, they’ll be more motivated than ever to shift their approach.

A New Era of Openness and Collaboration

The study also revealed what CEOs are looking for in employees, another clue that we’re moving in a direction that’s more open and collaborative. These CEO respondents want to recruit and hire people who excel at working in open, complex, and team-based environments. Highly valued skills are collaboration (75 percent), communication (67 percent), creativity (61 percent) and flexibility (61 percent).

It’s a new day and Firm and Corporate leadership must change with it.

How about you? What is your experience with “Command and Control” leaders? How do you see your leadership style shifting in today’s complex business environment?

To your success,

Mary

Mary C. Werner, CPA, MOD is the founder of Werner Coaching and Consulting, Inc., an executive coaching and organizational change consulting firm.  Mary was formerly with Ernst & Whinney (now E&Y) and Partner with Plante & Moran.  She is also a founding member of  The CPA Consultants’ Alliance, a working group of thought leaders unified in their efforts to further leadership in the accounting profession.  Mary, a certified executive coach through The Hudson Institute, is especially skilled at coaching and consulting with CPAs and other business professionals who are interested in accelerating their personal and professional growth for breakthrough results. She blogs regularly about leadership and change in individuals, firms and organizations.

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Simon Hill, Big4.com, Guest Blogger

In a conversation with a client recently we found ourselves talking at length about what the proliferation of specialist, cloud-based applications has meant for small and medium sized businesses. They were a 50 person development shop, but the conversation spanned the SME spectrum. I reflected on that conversation that evening and felt it was worth encapsulating it in a post to share as the issues and challenges are certainly not unique to that one business:

The emergence of specialist, low-cost cloud solutions is both a blessing and a challenge:

The boom in web-based IT means that there are a host of specialist solutions available as apps, SaaS, on-demand and cross device. SMEs are now able to buy services that previously would have, even if they had been available, been far too expensive for them. They can now license access to tools for small amounts of operational expense and on monthly commitments, the benefits are unquestionable and without doubt these services make our business lives much easier.

But (we went on to discuss) there are challenges, I didn’t take notes at the time as we were just talking, but here are the things I remember us talking over:

Which tools should we be using, differentiating and selecting them is time consuming and complex?

Before we knew we couldn’t afford the time or cost to deploy most of these services. Now we can afford them and the time to deploy is minutes or less, but we don’t know which to choose and differentiating between service a, b or c is complex.

This is a really interesting dilemma, but I don’t think this really gets to the heart of the issue. Ultimately choosing the tools and services comes down to a few key criteria – are they fit for purpose, are they user friendly, is it secure and accessible cross-device etc etc. What we actually got on to was what I think is the really interesting challenge with specialist apps, they are all, primarily, stand-alone and don’t really work that well together. So let’s explore that a bit more….

Why can’t my apps and services integrate and work together?

The strategy for specialist applications has to be customer centric and has to therefore look to integrate within the value-chain (i.e. other applications along that value chain) if they are going to be successful in the longer term. The focus is therefore on two key areas – the API for pushing and pulling info between services, and the platforms from which to centralise these integrations. Integrations with leading product management tools (Basecamp, Pivotal Tracker, Huddle) are a good example. Using an idea software tool as an example: ideas come in, are evaluated and socialised amongst the organisational crowd, decision makers approve the best ideas and these are then passed along the value-chain to the next specialist tool for delivery of these ideas. The tool has done its job and the baton is passed. Now the SME has a suite of affordable and integrated specialist, best-of-breed services, who needs a big expensive enterprise deployment!

There is a lot of cross-over of functionality, do I need specialist tools or will one generalist one do?

How many applications and services can you cope with? This really depends on the complexity and maturity of the value-chain and processes you are talking about. The key challenge is not complexity, its ensuring people know what tools are for what purpose and understanding where they fit in terms of organisational process. Select the tools that work for your business, if that is one or many across a process, but as you scale the specialist tools do all you can to ensure they can sing and dance together. The last thing you want are multiple versions of documents, IP or any other key business in several disparate systems and try and centralise on one service per use case i.e. one idea management tool, one project management tool, one instant messaging service etc.

We didn’t solve all the problems, but it was a refreshing chat and shows where we are now along the maturity cycle for SaaS for SMEs and also I suspect larger companies as well.
Simon Hill is CEO and co-founder of Wazoku, an idea software company, an Associate Director with the Venture Capital Firm FindInvestGrow and an active member of the London technology and entrepreneurial community. Simon is an alumni of PWC, Deloitte and Cap Gemini.

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“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eye for an instant?”

~Henry David Thoreau

My dog Zoey should have been named “Radar.” She has an uncanny ability to sense what family members are feeling and react to those feelings in kind. Whether we’re watching an exciting basketball game on TV (she goes crazy when we do), or one of us is feeling sad or discouraged (she makes a bee line for our lap), Zoey, completely without judgment, is in tune with our feelings.

Possessing accurate radar is in a sense what the EQ skill of empathy is all about. And empathy is the fifth and final skill that I’ll discuss as being critical to becoming a “trusted advisor.”

When you have empathy, you are “tuned in” to how others are feeling. You are able to look at a problem or conflict from another person’s perspective. Empathy is also a critical skill for negotiation as well, understanding what the other side wants and working to create a win-win result. (So it’s far from a “touchy-feely” skill.)

Empathy involves understanding another’s perspective, even if theirs’ is much different from your own. (Remember, it’s without judgment.) It involves letting the other person know that you have understood them, thus creating a bond and a relationship that surpasses “box checking” or “order taking.”

According to David Maister, one of the key hallmarks of a trusted advisor is their “focus on the client rather than themselves.” That is the essence of empathy. To put yourself in the shoes of the client in order to see a challenge from their perspective, understand what they are feeling and why.

This key EQ skill allows you to forge a strong bond of collaboration that helps you to solve your client’s problems and create successful and lasting client relationships.

Five EQ Skills Critical Trusted Advisor Skills

To recap, over the last several posts I’ve shared five key EQ skills:

1. Pursuit of Meaning: Your goal, desire and motivation to become a trusted advisor.
2. Emotional Self Awareness: You are aware of your emotions and how they impact your behavior and others.
3. Interpersonal Relationships: You have an ability to build and develop mutually satisfying relationships.
4. Problem Solving: You effectively use your emotions in the process of solving a problem by gathering information and making decisions without being emotionally distracted, stuck or overwhelmed in the process.
5. Empathy: You are “in tune” with how others are feeling, understanding their perspectives and forging a bond that builds outstanding relationships.

The good news is that each of these EQ skills can be learned or enhanced. If your goal is to move your role from client server to the next level of trusted advisor, add these five skills to your foundation of technical expertise.  I know it can happen. I’ve witnessed my previously reticent coaching clients successfully make that shift.

What do you think? What are your perspectives on what it takes to be a trusted advisor?

To your success,

Mary

Mary C. Werner, CPA, MOD, formerly with Ernst & Whinney (now E&Y) and a Partner at a regional CPA firm, is the founder of Werner Coaching and Consulting, Inc., an executive coaching and organizational change consulting firm.  She is also a founding member of  The CPA Consultants’ Alliance, a working group of thought leaders unified in their efforts to further leadership in the accounting profession.  Mary, a certified executive coach through The Hudson Institute, is especially skilled at coaching and consulting with CPAs and other business professionals who are interested in accelerating their personal and professional growth for breakthrough results. She blogs regularly about leadership and change in individuals, firms and organizations.

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, Big4 Guest Blogger  

“It is very important to understand that emotional intelligence is not the opposite of intelligence,

it is not the triumph of heart over head, it is the unique intersection of both.”

~David Caruso

My last three blog posts discussed your desired movement from technician to becoming a trusted advisor for your clients and the EQ skills you must possess to make that move. The three EQ facets I’ve shared so far are:

1. Pursuit of Meaning: Your goal, desire and motivation is to become a trusted advisor
2. Emotional Self Awareness: Your awareness of your emotions and how they impact your behavior and others
3. Interpersonal Relationships: Your ability to develop mutually satisfying relationships

But even if you possess each of these emotional intelligence skills, in order to become a true trusted advisor you must still solve your client’s most challenging problems. And at the leader level, you must regularly solve their problems when the pressure is on, when the stakes are high and all focus is squarely on you. All while keeping your emotions in check.

In the realm of EQ, what does this problem solving skill entail? Problem solving in an EQ sense is not about the quality of your solutions, but rather at how effectively you use your emotions in the process of solving a problem. It’s your ability to gather information and make decisions without being emotionally distracted, stuck or overwhelmed in the process.

You can possess all the technical knowledge in the world but if your emotions cause you to be frozen in your decision making, unable to consider various perspectives or  avoid dealing with the problem all together, your technical expertise is of little use to your client.

It’s fitting that I’m writing this blog post on the day that one of my former business partners (and trusted advisor extraordinaire) retires from Plante & Moran. My dear friend, Brent Cousino, is one of the most amazing trusted advisors I’ve ever worked with.

Brent had many client facing roles at P&M and, regardless of his position, his clients could always count on Brent to solve their most challenging problems calmly, methodically and effectively. Pressure, deadlines, budgets and client expectations were a constant in Brent’s consulting role and he managed these challenges brilliantly. His clients knew that he would utilize his technical expertise combined with exceptional problem solving skills to make a difference for them

Oh, and he also possesses the first three EQ skills in droves! Brent will certainly take his trusted advisor skills on the next leg of his leadership journey.

How would evaluate your problem solving skills when emotions are in play? Can you be relied on to be there for your clients, cool headed, focused and determined?

Becoming a trusted advisor truly demands these superior problem solving skills.

To your success,

Mary

Mary C. Werner, CPA, MOD, formerly with Ernst & Whinney (now E&Y) and a Partner at a regional CPA firm, is the founder of Werner Coaching and Consulting, Inc., an executive coaching and organizational change consulting firm.  She is also a founding member of  The CPA Consultants’ Alliance, a working group of thought leaders unified in their efforts to further leadership in the accounting profession.  Mary, a certified executive coach through The Hudson Institute, is especially skilled at coaching and consulting with CPAs and other business professionals who are interested in accelerating their personal and professional growth for breakthrough results. She blogs regularly about leadership and change in individuals, firms and organizations.

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By: Mary Werner, CPA, MOD, Big4 Guest Blogger  

“At its core, trust is about relationships.”

~David Maister

In my last two blog posts, I talked about two of the five key EQ skills needed to move from technician to trusted advisor: self actualization and emotional self-awareness.

It won’t come as a shock to you that the third EQ skill is your ability to build mutually satisfying relationships. The key words here are mutually and satisfying.

We’ve all been in client relationships that are one-sided or give us heartburn. Those relationships can never make it to a true trusted advisor status.

What I’m talking about in a trusted advisor relationship is based on a mutual give and take. You must give a favor to earn a favor.  In trusted advisor speak, you must “display your willingness to make an investment in the relationship in order to earn your client’s trust.”

What efforts do you put into maintaining healthy and effective relationships with your clients? Is your talk all technical and single focused? How do you get to know them on a personal level? What matters to them? Do they know what matters to you?  In the end, building a strong relationship requires a certain level of vulnerability and a willingness to open yourself up.

And we all know that a relationship that’s strong and satisfying is one based on thoughtfulness and openness to another’s ideas. The idea of collaboration and connection to others is something that trusted advisors value. And when a conflict arises, both parties work to resolve issues in a manner that is respectful and professional.

There is a misconception that strong trusted advisor relationships can only be built when the advisor is extraverted or gregarious. Quite the contrary. One of the most effective legal advisors I know is quite introverted but has forged strong relationships with his clients in a more reserved, one on one manner. Still strong. Still effective. Still a trusted advisor. He just accomplishes it in a more low-key manner. And his clients love him. He is their “go to guy.”

How would you rate your client relationships? Excellent? OK? Box Checking?

If you didn’t choose excellent, what’s holding you back from building deeper, more meaningful relationships with the clients you serve? Regardless of whether you’re an introvert or extravert, you can begin today to build the skills that it takes for forge mutually satisfying relationships with your clients and move yourself to that coveted “trusted advisor” status.

To your success,

Mary

Mary C. Werner, CPA, MOD, formerly with Ernst & Whinney (now E&Y) and a Partner at a regional CPA firm, is the founder of Werner Coaching and Consulting, Inc., an executive coaching and organizational change consulting firm.  She is also a founding member of  The CPA Consultants’ Alliance, a working group of thought leaders unified in their efforts to further leadership in the accounting profession.  Mary, a certified executive coach through The Hudson Institute, is especially skilled at coaching and consulting with CPAs and other business professionals who are interested in accelerating their personal and professional growth for breakthrough results. She blogs regularly about leadership and change in individuals, firms and organizations.

The post Rate Your Client Relationships: Are You a Trusted Advisor? appeared first on Big4.com.

by Maureen Broderick, Big4.com Guest Blogger

Developing and managing the service mix is challenging for many professional service firms. Even in the most sophisticated firms, service portfolio management is often a reactive rather than a proactive strategic priority. Few firms review their current service portfolios regularly, and even fewer have processes in place to capture, select, and commercialize innovative new offerings.

And, of course, change is difficult. Professionals, like all human beings, are often reluctant to change how they do things. Services and methodologies become entrenched, and even with compelling market reasons to upgrade or exit current approaches and offerings, it can be a painful process to convince people to do things differently. Rocking the service boat can be dangerous; a firm runs the risk of losing highly skilled performers who have an “I’ll do it my way” mentality.

So, how do you do it? In the course of interviewing leaders of professional service firms for the “The Art of Managing Professional Services”, a comprehensive, research-based new book on firm management, a number of common best practices for effective service management and innovation emerged:

• Strategically plan and manage the service portfolio. The best firms incorporate service strategy into both their long-term and annual planning cycles. The portfolio is regularly reviewed and analyzed to assess market relevance, identify gaps, and purge nonproductive services. Criteria are clearly established that provide the rationale for making tough decisions to jettison offerings that are not profitable or that are of marginal value to the marketplace.
• Establish and follow a protocol for innovation. The firms that excel in this area have a well articulated and communicated process for stimulating, capturing, selecting, and transforming the best ideas into market offerings.
• Validate offerings with the market. Astute firms talk to clients and prospective clients to test and validate current services, identify gaps, and uncover ideas for new services. Some firms integrate clients into the service innovation process to provide advice and direction on development and to test, debug, and validate a new offering.
• Assign ownership and accountability. Like any other important activity with bottom-line impact, successful service management requires ownership and accountability. Responsibility for keeping current offerings fresh and generating potential new service offerings must be clearly defined.

Innovation and the service strategy cycle

“There are probably 20 client meetings and valuable discussions happening right this minute in this building alone which could positively impact our current service offerings.”

Successfully managing service development and renewal is a continuous cycle of activities. The process begins with a portfolio review to identify gaps and retire services that are no longer relevant. It continues with ideation, the often-complex task of stimulating and capturing new ideas. Then comes selecting the best candidates for development. And finally, ideas are transformed into viable service offerings, the professionals are trained on delivery, and the services are launched. Gathering and sharing knowledge and client experiences is integral to the ongoing success of a service strategy. Each step of the cycle is important in creating a consistent engine of innovation.

Professional service firms deploy three basic approaches to service innovation. They can build it themselves by incubating and developing new ideas internally. They can acquire it by buying or merging with businesses or practice groups that bring new or complementary experience and knowledge. Or they can redesign, repackage, or bundle current services to create a “new” service or deliverable.

Stimulating smart, ambitious professionals to think creatively about what they do and how they do it would seem like an easy task for firm management. Yet the leaders we interviewed agree that there is definitely an art and science to innovation and that it is, in fact, not easy. Most firms choose to develop services through a variety of formal and informal internal vehicles. The firms that do this best deploy a combination of cultural reinforcement and an appropriate amount of structure and process. It is extremely important to create a culture that supports exploration and rewards and recognizes good ideas. But without a well-defined process to capture and nurture ideas and manage the development process, a tremendous amount of value can be left on the table. As Lem Lasher, Chief Innovation Officer at consulting firm CSC, says, “The best approach is to assume that professionals are creative by nature. They want to innovate and do new things, and it’s our job to create the ecosystem – the governance, the leadership, the structure, and the process to support and nurture a culture of innovation.”

Select the best ideas, and take them to market

“The challenge is capturing the ideas, selecting those that have applicability to broad populations of clients, and then driving the investment and development process.”

The approaches that firms pursue to select the best new ideas vary widely by culture, size, and organizational style and range from a “gut decision” to a formal committee review and analysis. Arguably the most difficult step in the innovation process – and the one that leaders struggle with the most – is translating ideas into action.

Based on our interviews, a ten-step strategy for moving from concept to commercialization has been identified:

• Develop criteria for service viability. The first hurdle for a potential new service offering is to satisfy a predetermined set of criteria for applicability, marketability, and profitability. In the applicability arena, key questions typically include the following: How big an idea is this? Does it have cross-practice potential? Can it go global? Does it meet a compelling and substantial client need? Does it have enduring value from a service perspective?In terms of marketability, key questions are likely to include the following: Does this idea have potential for enhancing our brand and reputation as a thought leader? Is it easy to sell both internally and to clients? Will it be a major differentiator from a competitive standpoint? Can we get it into the marketplace quickly and efficiently enough to make it worth the investment of time and energy required? Does it have breakthrough, best-practice, performance-boosting potential?From a profitability standpoint, a baseline ROI analysis generally is conducted that objectively reviews direct development expenses, top-line revenue projections, gross margin, and other financial performance metrics. If an idea is given the green light for development, results are carefully tracked and measured against projections.

• Build a business case for potential service. After an idea is vetted for service viability, most firms construct a business case to sell it to a review committee or top management group. The business case may be extremely detailed or a concise four-to-five-page proposal. Whatever form it takes, generally the business case covers the service viability considerations just outlined and includes a development timeline and ramp-up requirements.To drive innovation within the firm, Booz Allen Hamilton created a formal service campaign program. When senior leaders in the market surface new service areas that they think will be big opportunities, they can garner investment dollars from the leadership team if they put together a good business case to justify the investment. To do so, they must spend time thinking about methodologies, people requirements, and projections for growth. Campaigns have a two- or three-year lifetime. The campaign either grows up and becomes an embedded service offering, or it becomes what Booz Allen calls a sunset: It makes a splash, but the result doesn’t rise to the level of refreshing the firm’s core service offerings. Partners are highly motivated to build a successful business, which can mean promotion within the partner rank.
• Select the best ideas. The management team responsible for the selection chooses the ideas that best meet the firm’s criteria for viability, timing, budget, and resources.
• Test-market for receptivity. At this stage, firms with well-developed innovation programs move from internal to external review. This may involve a range of activities: brainstorming with clients, submitting service concepts to a client advisory board, consulting with independent experts, researching the competitive landscape, and evaluating potential market use.
• Establish benchmarks for the launch plan. After the business case has been presented and the development process approved, the next step involves determining a time frame and project milestones. The time frame from planning to launch can extend anywhere from a matter of months to three years, with clearly defined benchmarks to measure progress along the way.
• Pilot service offering. As with any standard product or service, the next step generally involves testing with a limited number of client implementations and then rigorously evaluating the road test results. In most cases the original service viability criteria are revisited.
• Refine and blueprint offering. When the testing process is complete, the next step is to fine-tune the offering and map it fully, with an eye toward market introduction. At this stage, a marketing plan for communicating the new offering and its client benefits is developed. If the offering has brand enhancement and/or thought leadership potential, promoting these assets will be integral to the marketing communications mix.
• Train teams. As part of their go-to-market strategy, the best programs make sure that internal support and expertise are fully mobilized to give the new service offering the best possible chance for a successful market introduction. Practice leaders and their teams are fully briefed on the offering, instructed in effective service delivery, and given the communication tools they need to promote it to their client base.
• Launch. If all the other pieces are in place, the launch stage should unfold smoothly. In some cases the launch may involve introducing the service on a limited basis and then rolling it out nationally or globally. A strong marketing communications strategy and its aggressive implementation are critical for maximizing market impact.
• Monitor and refresh. The service is tracked and reviewed on a regular basis to continuously test its market acceptance and financial performance against plan. Clients are interviewed on the offering pros and cons, and adjustments are made as appropriate.

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(www.theartofmanagingprofessionalservices.com), was published in November 2010 by Wharton School Publishing.

The post Staying Relevant appeared first on Big4.com.

, Big4 Guest Blogger                                                                                                                                       

”Giving advice is not an exclusively logical process, but rather an emotional duet played between the advisor and client.If you cannot learn to recognize, process and respond to a client’s emotions, you cannot be an effective advisor.”

~David Maister

A couple weeks ago, I had coffee with Rob Nance of IShade. One of the top issues we discussed was the critical importance for CPAs (and other professionals like lawyers and engineers) to shift into a role of “trusted advisor” to their clients moving from a transactional problem solver or one-dimensional technician.

How can the shy or reticent professional, who is confident in the numbers they’ve crunched or statutes they site, move beyond the role of technician and into a role of a true advisor? Or how can the extravert stop talking long enough to listen to their clients in order to learn their most pressing issues?

It turns out that developing professionals along 5 specific emotional intelligence (EQ) realms can make the difference between being seen as “just a bean counter” OR “a valued member of the client’s team.”

David Maister in his book, The Trusted Advisor, describes several distinct attributes.

Trusted Advisors focus on:

• the client, rather than on themselves
• the client as a whole individual, rather than a person fulfilling a role
• problem definition and resolution rather than technical or content mastery
• new ways to be of great service to the client
• doing the right thing rather versus achieving their own rewards
• quality client relationships

Over the next several blog posts I’ll share each of the five key EQ realms along with strategies for building your skills in these areas.

Trusted Advisor EQ Skill #1—Pursuit of Meaning

All the skill building in the world won’t matter if you don’t find meaning or purpose or desire in becoming a trusted advisor to your clients. So ask yourself: What motivates me? Is becoming a trusted advisor a focus for me as I plan for my future? How committed am I to continuous improvement and building the skill sets that becoming a trusted advisor requires?

The process of becoming a trusted advisor is a journey not a destination. It’s a process of continuously honing your skills and abilities to become an outstanding resource for your clients. It often requires moving outside your comfort zone and stretching beyond your current capabilities.

If your answers to the above questions indicate that you are ready and willing to transition into this more advanced role, now take stock of your strengths and weaknesses. Ask yourself: What are my best gifts and talents that I can leverage as I make the transition? What do I enjoy currently in my role in serving clients? How can I take the skills I use successfully in my personal life and apply them in my professional world?

Becoming “self-actualized” may sound high minded or philosophical but it’s actually quite practical. When you are interested in persistently trying to improve yourself and engage in meaningful goals and objectives, great things can happen. Success, happiness and life satisfaction involve doing what you enjoy and finding ways to apply your talents and strengths.

Your assignment for the next week is to take stock of your strengths. What do you love to do in your job? What do you excel at? What gives meaning to the work you do? What are you motivated to achieve in your role? How about your areas for development? What are those? How motivated are you to shore those up?

Your journey to trusted advisor begins here.

To your success,

Mary

Mary C. Werner, CPA, MOD, formerly with Ernst & Whinney (now E&Y) and Partner at a regional CPA firm, is the founder of Werner Coaching and Consulting, Inc., an executive coaching and organizational change consulting firm.  Mary, a certified executive coach through The Hudson Institute, is especially skilled at coaching and consulting with CPAs and other business professionals who are interested in accelerating their personal and professional growth for breakthrough results. She blogs regularly about leadership and change in firms and organizations. 

The post From Technician to Trusted Advisor: 5 EQ Skills That Make a Difference appeared first on Big4.com.

http://www.amazon.com/Ex-Why-Bob-Sinnott/dp/146360677X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329317643&sr=1-1

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Drive Process Optimization

 A common approach is to seek the optimization of processes such that quality improves and cycle time is reduced. The simple steps of mapping the current state Operational and IT processes, breaking each process down into three levels of delivery will identify opportunities for improvement. Key items to look for include: repeatable actions or processes, actions that results in defects, and actions that result in mis-information.

For example, take a look at your current processes for Level 0 to Level 3 IT support. What are the handoff’s and processes that occur once the call is taken initially or the issue becomes known? Mapping each process, each handoff, who is involved, the amount of time, the amount of effort, the number of manual and automated tracking systems will identify the opportunities. The team should be looking for waste (e.g.: steps that can be removed from the process, areas to apply standardization for repeatability of process, removal of bottlenecks to achieve more productivity in the same time period). The objective is to make the changes without compromising the quality of the product or service delivered.

Conduct a Lean Operations and IT Walkthrough

 There are four common areas of focus when conducting a Lean Operations and IT walkthrough, namely; operating practices, management systems, organization and capabilities, and mindset and behavior. Conducting a Lean Operations and IT walkthrough of these four areas will provide some unique opportunities and items to consider.

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, Big4 Guest Blogger  

“Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.”

~Michaelangelo

Michaelangelo said that in sculpting his masterpiece “David” that he was merely chipping away from the marble everything that was not David. In other words, one needs only remove the excess stone to reveal the work of art within.

When we apply this notion to us humans, we discover that we are all works of art in all our varied manifestations. Life’s true journey may be the process of uncovering and removing what’s in the way of our shining through with beauty and brilliance.

In support of helping us find the best in ourselves and others, consider the practice called “giving an A“ that comes from one of my all-time favorite books, The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. This practice asks us to choose the perspective of seeing everyone (even ourselves!) as holding great potential. You can give an A to anyone—your spouse, children, employer, co-workers—even strangers.

Taking the familiar classroom example first, notice that when students think of themselves as C students, they may not bother trying very hard. If the teacher expects them to do poorly, the students are likely to fulfill that expectation. What would happen if the expectation were that the students were A students?

Benjamin Zander, a world-renowned conductor and teacher, experimented with giving As to all his graduate music students at the start of school. They were instructed to pre-date a letter to him from the end of the semester, writing to tell him not just what they had accomplished, but who they had become in the process of living up to that A. The results were amazing. Students who had been anxious over their performance and who were playing it safe, began to see themselves differently and participated at a higher level.

In our work lives, it is easy to fall into the habit of judging others (ourselves, too!) for not living up to what we think is right and then holding that judgment as always true—in essence, labeling them C or D students. Imagine coming from a perspective of believing in an associate’s creativity and potential. The result can be working together toward a shared goal of excellence.

The world is much more beautiful and full of possibility when we choose to focus on the work of art within rather than the excess stone that appears to be the reality. It’s really a choice of perspective. What grade do you want to live into?

To your success,

Mary

Mary C. Werner, CPA, MOD, formerly with Ernst & Whinney (now E&Y) and Partner at a regional CPA firm, is the founder of Werner Coaching and Consulting, Inc., an executive coaching and organizational change consulting firm.  Mary, a certified executive coach through The Hudson Institute, is especially skilled at coaching and consulting with CPAs and other business professionals who are interested in accelerating their personal and professional growth for breakthrough results. She blogs regularly about leadership and change in firms and organizations. 

The post Give Yourself an “A” appeared first on Big4.com.

_____ MY INDUSTRY: Is this a growth industry or is it a shrinking industry? Do some homework on the company, competitors and industry. Know where your company ranks in the marketplace. Also, is this an industry you want to be in?
_____ MY COMPANY: Is this a company doing well and is it a stable long-term player? Is this a company going through some challenging times and you are learning something new every day at work? It is important to feel good about the company you work for – you should feel proud to say you work for them – whether it is a stable environment or a challenging one is OK as long as you are learning and feeling good about working there. Is the company liable to be acquired or split up in the short-term? Do you hear and read good things about the company?
_____ MY CURRENT POSITION: Is it challenging and forcing you to develop new skills? Do you get to step out of my comfort zone? Is your boss someone you can learn from? Could s/he be a mentor? Will this position help you r career marketability?
_____ JOB ENJOYMENT: Is it fun to come to work every day? Do you really enjoy the work you are doing? Do you dread the beginning of each day and/or week?
_____ GROWTH POTENTIAL: Specifically what position do you think you can be promoted to, in how many months, etc? Where are you going and do you want to go there? What is the record of accomplishment of the previous people in your position? Does that meet your own growth expectations?
_____ CHEMISTRY: Do you really enjoy this environment? Do you ‘fit’ in well with the group of, people you work with? Do you have a mentor who is assisting you with your career (can be inside or outside your company)? What is the Method of Operation (MO) of Senior Management? Do you agree with their MO?
_____ GEOGRAPHIC IMPACT: As you predict your growth with your company, what will be the relocation requirements for you and your family in the future? Does this fit with your career plans and your family plans? (It is helpful to be flexible to relocate; especially early in your career) In today’s global environment, career growth may depend on relocation for a period of time.
_____ SPOUSE’S CAREER: Does your career and your spouse’s complement each other, or will one of you have to make a sacrifice for the other? If considering relocation, can my spouse find a comparable position?
_____ COMPENSATION: Will your compensation growth enable you to enjoy the lifestyle you are looking for? Will you be losing ground in the future? (This should be a lower priority, especially earlier in your career)

Your career is your “business”. Manage your business well, provide proper growth management and make improvements when necessary. Review your progress at least annually and plan for the future – your future.

Cora Mae Lengeman
Recruiter, Speaker, Author
Managing Partner at Norwood Network Associates LLC
‘An executive search firm committed to performance, quality and results’

My passion is finding the best people who can help my clients accomplish their business goals. For over two decades I have been recognized for closely collaborating with my clients to identify qualified leaders who can complement the corporate structure and culture. My expertise is senior management and executives in accounting and finance, and financial advisory services search.

The post ANNUAL REPORT – FOR YOUR CAREER appeared first on Big4.com.

Sounds simple doesn’t it? Well, let me give you two real examples of what doesn’t make your company look good to potential candidates:

1. An approved recruiting vendor for your company (a large manufacturing firm) has a contract person in place while trying to fill an international tax position. The approved vendor doesn’t want to work on it (making more money with the contract person in place) so they share it with another recruiting firm to work on it with the stipulation that the 2nd recruiting firm (2nd firm) will present all resumes to the approved vendor (1st firm) for presentation to the client. The second firm which is known for their medical recruiting, knows nothing about your company or the position, but has the job description, so they share the description with a third recruiting firm known for accounting, financial and tax recruiting. The third firm cannot get any information regarding the company, the department or the people in the department as the 2nd firm doesn’t want the 1st firm to know that they also “farmed” the search out to another recruiting firm. Who is representing your company to the marketplace and what are they communicating in this example? Better yet, will your position ever get filled?

2. Your company is in need of a ______ (fill in the blank) so you ask five (5) recruiters to find someone to fill the position. The position is important and very specialized and the demand for this type of person is high in the market. Plus you need them quickly – thus the 5 recruiters. Your parameters are so specific that there are only about a hundred people in the country that can fill your position and these 100 people get contacted by all of the recruiters you asked to help you. The prospects get email blasts, telephone calls, ads in their LinkedIn Groups everyday regarding your position from 5 different recruiters. The job description is posted everywhere by 5 different recruiters. You have looked at several resumes that are not even close to being qualified for the position, interviewed some close potentials and even made an offer, but that fell through because the recruiter failed to tell you (or didn’t know) that the candidate could not relocate. Six months go by and you still have not hired anyone. How does your company look in the eyes of the potential candidates for this position? Will your position be filled with the best candidate or one that is just good enough? How does this look for future open positions?

This sounds pretty harsh doesn’t it? These things really go on – I know from personal experience. As a company you are responsible for who represents you and how you are represented. Don’t screw up your reputation by using the wrong recruiters. Don’t let your in-house recruiters hurt your reputation by posting the job description all over the internet. Have some class – look like a winner – be particular – be special.

Pay attention to which recruiters you use – meet them first and be sure they are going to do what they promise they will do and that they can accomplish what they promise. Ask for a weekly up-date on how many people they contacted and an overview of what the responses were. These may help you re-define your parameters when and if necessary. You will also know the recruiter is actually doing their job.

Recruiter fees should never be a consideration – in the first example above the 1st firm quoted 20% on a position with a salary of $120,000, but the recruiting firm didn’t care because they had no intention of working on the search as they made more money on the contract person in place. What does it matter what fee they quoted – they never planned to do anything.

What does matter is who is going to get the job done. Use one recruiter that will get the job done. Paying a recruiter 1/3 of the annual salary is far cheaper than having the position go unfilled for over six months or if the approved vendor makes sure that no qualified resumes get to the company and the position is never filled.

Cora Mae Lengeman
Recruiter, Speaker, Author
Managing Partner at Norwood Network Associates LLC
‘An executive search firm committed to performance, quality and results’

My passion is finding the best people who can help my clients accomplish their business goals. For over two decades I have been recognized for closely collaborating with my clients to identify qualified leaders who can complement the corporate structure and culture. My expertise is senior management and executives in accounting and finance, and financial advisory services search.

The post A MESSAGE TO COMPANIES LOOKING TO HIRE appeared first on Big4.com.

Simon Hill, Big4.com, Guest Blogger

Having worked for 3 of the big 4 consultancies during my working life before abandoning all that to join the entrepreneurial ranks, I am frequently asked about my perspective on this question. The honest answer is I am not sure that they can. I mean clearly there is plenty of opportunity and indeed capacity for the very smart and well equipped employees of these large professional services firms to help young businesses in all manor of ways. However, I just don’t know if it will ever happen in a way that is meaningful for the new businesses who would love nothing more than their help, but who cannot afford a string of half delivered promises or deferred obligations. I don’t mean this to sound cynical, I honestly wish I could see it differently.
Here are some examples of where it might work well, but I can’t see it ever happening (I am happy to be proven wrong):
1. Accountancy services – there are very few entrepreneurs I know who know the first thing about tax, finances and to be honest much of the accounting aspect of running a business. It is absolutely critical to get things set up right, to keep the ship steady and to ensure that money coming in and out is accounted for. However, beyond the basics there are a number of other opportunities for small businesses that good accountants should be and could be helping with. I see this opportunity to build trusted relationships with the businesses of the future for free or low cost as a great opportunity and service.
2. Resource lending – having people sitting on the bench and not on projects for a long time serves no-one in these large professional services firms. Managing this is extremely complex, but having options to share resource with start-ups I see as a great opportunity for all involved. As a startup entrepreneur I would love nothing more than a month or six weeks with a free and very safe pair of hands to deliver one of the multitude of complex projects sitting on our back burner. For the person coming in they would get a very different experience within a small, entrepreneurial environment but in reality much of what they would learn would be like any other project. I really think this is a massive win win for everyone.
3. Mentoring – setting up in business is extremely daunting and one of the hardest things to find is good, reliable and relevant mentors. What we founders really need is someone who knows business, knows leadership and can give good, sage, experience led advice. Senior members from across functions within large professional services firms are pretty well equipped and would be very able as business mentors both by virtue of what they know themselves and also the usually vast networks they have. This wouldn’t have to take up much of anyone’s time, but could be absolutely invaluable for the startup and I think there would be cross learning as well.
Simon Hill is CEO and co-founder of Wazoku, an idea management company, an Associate Director with the Venture Capital Firm FindInvestGrow and an active member of the London technology and entrepreneurial community. Simon is an alumni of PWC, Deloitte and Cap Gemini.

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Susan Black, Big4.com

KPMG appears to be in hot water.

The UK Telegraph reports that Paul Moore, HBOS whistleblower and former head of risk has referred KPMG to the UK regulator FRC in a formal complaint.

What is HBOS you may ask?

Well no one seems to know for sure, according to Wikipedia, although officially HBOS is not an abbreviation of any specific words, it is widely presumed to stand for Halifax Bank of Scotland.  In effect, HBOS plc is a UK banking and insurance company, fully owned by Lloyds Banking Group, which took it over in January 2009. It is the holding company for Bank of Scotland plc, and formed in 2001 merger of Halifax plc and the Governor and Company of the Bank of Scotland.

It appears that Mr Moore has not stopped there, he has also written to Treasury select committee chairman Andrew Tyrie, seeking his support. KPMG both audited and carried out special reports for HBOS, and for the firm, the complaint could be the first time it has faced the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) over the work it did leading up to the bail-out of the HBOS. And any investigation, says the Telegraph, is likely to focus on the responsibilities auditors have to ensure they don’t breach conflicts of interests and are sceptical enough about the information they audit.

 “I am going to the FRC with a formal complaint because I have crossed the Rubicon with KPMG,” Mr Moore told The Sunday Telegraph.

And Mr. Moore himself was a former KPMG partner, has been in correspondence with John Griffith-Jones, KPMG chairman and senior partner.

In a letter on April 4 2012, Mr Moore apparently asked Mr Griffith-Jones to send a private apology for KPMG’s role in the investigation of his sacking, to donate the alleged £1.2m fee paid to KPMG for the investigation to charity and to accept that the particular partner involved in the investigation fell below industry standards and should be held to account with disciplinary action. And then Mr. Moore gets more tough, claiming that “money seems to be more important in KPMG’s strategy than integrity and professionalism”.  And then he warned Mr Griffith-Jones at the time that if measures were not taken to shake up the attitudes of the firm, he would make a formal complaint to the FRC.

And so in this surprising turn of events, Mr. Moore seems to have made good on his warning.

And KPMG brushed aside all stuff about the Rubicon, saying, “We stand by the quality of our work in regards to HBOS.”

The post Paul Moore, HBOS Whistleblower, Claims to Have Crossed The Rubicon With KPMG appeared first on Big4.com.

, Big4 Guest Blogger  

Recently, I had a coaching call with a client, an internal audit leader of a Fortune 500 Company. (We’ll call him George.)  George’s performance was solid but his 360 results indicated a need for more strategic thinking and less time operating “in the weeds.”

George’s previous roles and background supported his habit and comfort with the details. However, as he took on additional leadership responsibilities, he knew he needed to shift his focus to a more big picture and strategic mindset.

George genuinely wanted to learn new skills, to grow in his role and to move up in the company, but he was struggling to make the shift.

Once we uncovered George’s beliefs (many of them false) about what kept him in the details, I asked George for a visual that would describe what it would feel like if he remained there.

“Like I’m lost in a jungle,” he said. “I want to get out. I need to get out. It would be great to get out. And the longer I stay here, the more it will negatively impact my career.” (Just let your mind wander about the long term dangers of being lost in a jungle.)

The Jungle. For George, it was a powerful visual.

So how could he get out? During our call, we worked to identify strategies or “tools” he could use to exit the jungle. A helicopter (his direct reports) and a machete (increased self-awareness to know when he was getting pulled in) were just two of the tools he identified.

Once his limiting beliefs were identified and strategies for action were developed, coaching then focused on building new habits and behaviors to keep him out of “the jungle.”

Fast forward to today. The visual of the jungle and the personal and professional dangers it held for George were strong enough to lead him out. With his awareness raised and his team solidly behind him, George is now more effective at operating at the strategic level that his role requires.

What about you? How often to you get stuck in The Jungle? Is there a good visual that describes a shift you need to make to take your performance to the next level?

To your success,

Mary

Mary C. Werner, CPA, MOD, formerly with Ernst & Whinney (now E&Y) and Partner at a regional CPA firm, is the founder of Werner Coaching and Consulting, Inc., an executive coaching and organizational change consulting firm.  Mary, a certified executive coach through The Hudson Institute, is especially skilled at coaching and consulting with CPAs and other business professionals who are interested in accelerating their personal and professional growth for breakthrough results. She blogs regularly about leadership and change in firms and organizations. 

The post The Dangers of the Jungle appeared first on Big4.com.

The CEO of a $12 billion company summed it up neatly when he told me, “When someone walks into my office and is trying to market to me or sell something, I can always tell how experienced they are by the quality of the questions they ask.”

A good power question helps you uncover a prospect’s most urgent needs. It cuts through the noise and gets right to the heart of the issue. It uncovers higher-level goals and aspirations. It shows, in the most convincing way possible, that you’re thoughtful and smart.

When you first meet with a potential client, you must establish your credibility and understand their goals. Our natural tendency is to do this by telling—by describing our company, our services, and the uniqueness of what we do. That’s boring.

The best way to build trust in your competence is to ask credibility-building questions.  These are questions that implicitly demonstrate your experience while encouraging the client to talk about their issues. This is what the CEO was talking about.

It requires good upfront research and planning to develop strong, credibility-building questions. Your questions will vary based on your particular client and industry, but they should sound like these:

• “How are you reacting to the new reporting requirements [i.e., to a trend or a new regulation]? Several of my largest clients have taken a wait-and-see attitude, but others are already conducting in-depth assessments…”
• “Your CEO’s speech to last month’s industry conference certainly put a stake in the ground in terms of your international growth aspirations…how is this going to impact your talent acquisition and development efforts?

A credibility-boosting question, in short, explores the client’s issues while demonstrating your knowledge, experience, and preparation for the meeting.

A second essential objective with a prospect is to understand their issues—what I call their agenda. Every executive has an agenda of three to five critical business goals or priorities. Your job is to explore, understand, and add value to this agenda. One of the most direct agenda-sensing questions is, “How will you be evaluated at the end of the year by your leadership? What metrics will be used?”

A second type of agenda-uncovering question focuses on why. Clients often specify a particular intervention—“We need a training program” or, “We need coaching.” When they do, you must ask “Why?”: “Why have you decided that?” If you ask this, even four or five times, you will expose the underlying need or goal. By expanding the conversation you will expand the potential engagement.

Other agenda-setting questions could include:

• “Where will your future growth come from?”
• “How will you decide whether or not to…(make an important decision)”
• “What organizational or operational capabilities do you need to strengthen in order to support your future strategy?”
• “Who or what could be a disruptor in your business?”
• “As you think about the future of your business, what are you most excited about? What are you most concerned about?”

Remember, one of the important ways you add value in a first meeting is by being thought provoking and helping your prospect think differently about his or her issues. Good questions are a great way to do this.

***************

Andrew Sobel was a Senior Vice President and Country Chief Executive for Gemini Consulting (15 years). He writes about building long-term client relationships, and is the author of four business bestsellers including Power Questions, All for One, and Clients for Life. www.andrewsobel.com.

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, Big4 Guest Blogger       

“Appreciative Inquiry is more than a focus on the positive.

It is the creation of conditions that tap the generative potential of people and organizations.”

~Gervase Bushe

CPAs across the country have put the finishing touches on their “busy season” and there is a collective sigh of relief. But you’re not really done yet. Now, is a great time, while the memories are still fresh, to reflect and “re-view” your performance over the last six months.

What went well? What should I do more of? Less of? How can I use the best parts of my performance to learn and take my performance to the next level?

Taking this “appreciative approach” helps you manage your change and development through the identification of what works and analysis of how to do MORE of that.

This is an alternative to the typical view of “what did I do wrong?” or “what are my weaknesses?” We identify a problem, analyze the cause and generate solutions all through the lens of fixing or avoiding problems. That approach works in some cases but it encourages us to focus on the negative rather than the energy and sense of possibility that comes from envisioning what’s possible.

To illustrate an appreciative approach to “re-viewing” your performance, think about your responses to the following questions suggested in the Appreciative Inquiry mindset:

1.  Considering all of your objectives for your role, what are you proud of?  What have you accomplished and what are you doing that works?

Give yourself credit for every little thing you do that brings you a feeling or demonstration of success, to even the smallest degree, in any work situation.  Be specific.

2.  What contributed to those successes? What caused those things to work? What or who has allowed you to do your best work? (Consider your team leader, team, firm overall, clients, circumstances, physical situation, and opportunities.)

3. How have you changed?  Think about yourself at the beginning of the year and the person you are today. How have you changed? Again, give yourself credit for every little improvement in your professional competencies or personal effectiveness. What did you do that helped you improve? The activities may have occurred at work, home or in the community.

4. Going beyond your given objectives...  In your work at your firm and as a member of a greater community, what achievements, accomplishments, or activities are you proud of?

5. Becoming even more effective….   To make yourself even more effective in the future, what do you want to continue to do, do more of, do better, or do differently? Of all the items listed and described above, which are the ones you are inspired to act on. (This is where your team leader can help prioritize your objectives.)

6.  What support within the firm do you have to do the things you identified in #5? (Money, time, training, access to subject matter experts and support staff, equipment, materials, etc.)  What resources do you have outside the company?  This is where your team leader can help in making sure you have what you need to succeed.)

Appreciative Inquiry as a model for change has been around awhile and its applications to individuals, teams and organizations are far and wide. It is a different approach to viewing your situation today that helps shape your vision for tomorrow.

What do you think? Have you used this approach in your firm’s change initiatives? I welcome your comments and input. I’d love to hear from you.

To your success,

Mary

Mary C. Werner, CPA, MOD, formerly with Ernst & Whinney (now E&Y) and Partner at a regional CPA firm, is the founder of Werner Coaching and Consulting, Inc., an executive coaching and organizational change consulting firm.  Mary, a certified executive coach through The Hudson Institute, is especially skilled at coaching and consulting with CPAs and other business professionals who are interested in accelerating their personal and professional growth for breakthrough results. She blogs regularly about leadership and change in firms and organizations. 

The post Your Performance “Re-View” appeared first on Big4.com.

“…successful teaming begins with an embrace of the unknown and a commitment to learning that drives employees to absorb, and sometimes create, new knowledge while executing.”  ~Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School

What is “teaming”? In her recent HBR article titled, Teamwork On the Fly, Professor Amy Edmondson describes her research and experience with a new form of team, a new way to get work accomplished in our fast paced, global business environment.  Flexible teamwork, or “teaming,” gathers experts from wide ranging divisions and disciplines into temporary groups to tackle projects or problems and accelerate reaction to new opportunities. Imagine a team where:

• Multiple functions/disciplines work together
• Relationships are temporary
• People are geographically dispersed
• Each project uses new and evolving individual skill sets
• Work can be uncertain and chaotic

Sounds like fun. But building a solid base of soft skills is critical to  successful “teaming.“

You may think this type of team arrangement would never apply to your circumstances.…but think again. In recent months, I’ve had several of my coaching clients and one family member participate in this type of team format.

A Case in Point

Yesterday, IBM launched PureSystems which IBM describes as  “a new, simpler era of computing.” I’m not a techie but it’s a big deal and as the company shared during its launch event, “it’s the result of $2 billion in R&D and acquisitions over the past four years.” My daughter Sarah, an “IBMer” and a member of the marketing launch team, has lived and breathed the project since she joined the company last year. It was top secret and she could not share what she was working on but I do know that her team could be described with the “teaming” characteristics described above.

In another case, one of my coaching clients, a CPA formerly with a Big4 firm and now with General Motors, was tapped to lead a project with team members who span the globe and possess variety of skills and disciplines. He had not previously met any of his team members.

You don’t have to work for mega companies like IBM or GM to experience this teaming concept. This type of flexible team work is happening at large and small firms alike.

Required Skill Sets

Technical skills are expected of course. But to achieve and excel in this new form of team environment, soft skills in emotional intelligence (EQ) are imperative. And the good news is that these skills can be learned and developed. Witnessing teaming in action through my clients and daughter and reading Edmondson’s descriptions of successful teams, I believe the following are key EQ skills that can make all the difference:

•  Flexibility: Not surprising, your ability to adapt your emotions, thoughts and behaviors to unfamiliar, unpredictable and dynamic circumstances or ideas is critical to survival in this type of team environment. Change is here to stay and being adaptable and flexible in team circumstances has never been more important.
•  Problem Solving: How do you find solutions to problems in situations where emotions are involved? Deadlines are a way of life and especially in teaming circumstances, complete information is just not available.
•  Interpersonal Relationships: Developing and maintaining great relationships is a skill set that is easier when teams are based on longstanding, mutual experiences and geographic proximity. But in teaming, relationships must build quickly without the benefit of trust building as a foundation.
•  Empathy: Differences in cultural norms, values and perspectives are natural in a teaming situation. Empathy built on listening to others opinions and ideas is critical to successful decision making and project completion.
•  Assertiveness: In a teaming situation, team members must speak up and offer their perspective and ideas. They must be able to communicate honestly and directly, raise issues and acknowledge when errors are made.
•  Stress Management: This form of team is not for the faint of heart. Being able to cope with stressful, rapidly changing circumstances, different personalities and functional skill sets  is a requirement of leaders at all levels. And I would argue, even more so in a teaming situation.

As Edmondson says in her article, “teaming” is here to stay. This form of flexible team is challenging for sure, yet as Edmondson describes in her article, there are great rewards for both the individual and the organization.

Are you ready for this brave new world?

To your success,

Mary

Mary C. Werner, CPA, MOD, formerly with Ernst & Whinney (now E&Y) and Partner at a regional CPA firm, is the founder of Werner Coaching and Consulting, Inc., an executive coaching and organizational change consulting firm.  Mary, a certified executive coach through The Hudson Institute,  is especially skilled at coaching and consulting with CPAs and other business professionals who are interested in accelerating their personal and professional growth for breakthrough results. She blogs regularly about leadership and change in firms and organizations. 

The post The Brave New World of “Teaming” appeared first on Big4.com.

By Richard Cornelisse

In the last decade, companies have increasingly automated their business processes. The most common method is by using an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Such a set up can be hugely complex. This is definitely the case where it relates to European based indirect tax. As manual processes are subject to human error, automation could – under circumstances – result in performance improvements and savings.

A third party tax engine might be a better solution than improving the indirect tax functionality of its own ERP systems when the organization uses multiple ERP systems. Interfacing via a bolt-on could be a better alternative.  Outsourcing is a topic for a next blog.

ERP Systems

ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle either determine the VAT treatment (liability and VAT recovery) of businesses’ transactions automatically or this is a (semi) manual process.

Multinationals run often various versions of ERP systems or legacy systems without harmonization. The ERP set-up is often per business unit and thus multiple set ups per country are possible.

This could be the root cause that:

1. running of system’s exception reports to look for missed opportunities, under claimed VAT and potential fraudulent transactions is still a challenging exercise
2. a lot of manual (re)work is often needed to file the VAT reporting and reconcile the VAT numbers due to the use of multiple spreadsheets and various data sources (divisions, different systems)

The latter is interesting as spreadsheets are usually found at critical points in the audit trail
 and are designed by non-specialists with no system expertise
.

An ERP system is not just an accounting system but also provides information about planning and production as well as being able to produce invoices and various reports.

Tax Controversy Strategy

The advantage of these systems is that management information is readily accessible and that should give some food for thought for tax auditors as well. Transactions from various business units can be monitored and managed on time. Is this something to take in consideration during updating or setting up your ‘Tax Controversy Strategy‘?

A ‘Material weakness’ Audit Item

The decision to adopt a particular ERP system is usually made for business reasons whereby the VAT administration is only a minor consideration or not considered at all.

Despite that according to Sarbanes Oxley the configuration of the VAT rules in an ERP system is a ‘material weakness’ audit item (a 1% mistake or less often impacts shareholders value), in practice, it is often still overlooked. The Global Survey of ‘KPMG Benchmark 2012′ confirms again that indirect tax policies are either not documented or monitored properly.

VAT as a transaction tax is an essential element within the ERP system.  The impact of the ‘VAT Throughput‘ should be understood and managed properly within the organization (See also ‘Managing The Perception Of C-Level‘).

Performance Improvement

The advantage is that Indirect Tax functionality can be automated (full or to a certain extend) in a company’s own ERP system especially if SAP or Oracle is used. It is about mitigating of risks and reduce the amount of manual work and rework (the ‘hidden factory’).

Is the functionality of the ERP system used at full VAT capacity? What are the gaps and consequences?

The perception of Plug and Play

If you provide goods and/or services locally subject to the standard VAT rate it might be ‘Plug and Play’. That is the most simple VAT business model I could come up with.

In practice, configuration (the amount depends) is needed when companies deal cross border and/or complex business models are set up such as a centralized principal structure with for example a “Limited Risk Distributor” or a “Commissionaire”.

VAT Automation of Complex Business Models

There are all kinds of business reasons for centralizing supply chains and set up models like “Limited Risk Distributor” or “Commissionaire”. The challenge from an implementation perspective is indirect tax.

What makes it complex

Lets take LRDs/Commissionaires as an example.

LRDs/Commissionaires have neither legal ownership to the inventory during storage nor during transport as the Principal is at that stage still the legal owner. It is often the case that the Principal delivers the goods physically and directly to the final customer. This creates only one physical departure of goods (`goods issue’) in the ERP system. However, two invoices should be raised (one from Principal to LRDs/Commissionaires and one from the LRD/Commissionaire to the final customer.

In the ERP system, the correct ‘ship from’ information at the LRD/Commissionaire level might be missing so that the VAT treatment by the system is determined based on the ‘ship from’ and ‘ship to’ information present at the Principal level. In principle, for cross-border transactions this results in an incorrect VAT treatment.

Therefore, in practice, it is time consuming to correctly configure the ‘Tax determination logic’ set up. You need to know your practical workarounds, preferable in the design stage.

Even More Bottlenecks In Case of a Commissionaire Structure

A “Commissionaire model” has some more bottlenecks. A “commissionaire” is never the legal owner of the goods. From a VAT perspective, the commissionaire acts as though he were the owner and a fictitious supply takes place to and subsequently by the commissionaire.

Since according to civil law, the commissionaire does not have ownership, the commissionaire does not own any inventory not even temporarily.

That is different with the LRD as normally LRD gets ownership via flash title for a very short period. Tax technical risk analysis about e.g. “flash titles and transfer of economic ownership” is outside scope of this blog.

Based on the above the commissionaire has to issue invoices in his own name which can create problems if there are no bookings with respect to inventory.

There are all practically workarounds of course but that needs planning in time again preferably in the design phase.

For what can go wrong see “Indirect Tax Exposures Others Have Faced“.

General Overview VAT and Systems

If you like to know more about where VAT impacts the systems watch ‘Systems For Dummies‘.

Richard’s other Big4 publications

• How to Execute A Tax Strategic Plan And Be Successful
• About Market Leadership And Non Traditional Competitors
• How To Manage The Perception Of C-level And Realize Tax Objectives
• The Conflict Between ‘Actual To Budget’ Controls And ‘Budget-based Compensation Targets’
• Tax Controversy Strategy: ‘Proactively Managing The Changing Landscape’
• About ‘Business Integrity And ‘Being Inspired’
• The Indirect Tax Profession Is Evolving From An Individual To A Team Sport
• Would European Value Added Tax Work For The United States?
• US VAT Introduction Versus The Proposed Changes Of The ‘European Union’ VAT System

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 Centralized Business Models And ‘Indirect Tax Automation’ appeared first on Big4.com.

In my blog “The Value Of Benchmarking: Get Some Objective Evidence” I wrote that 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 the own company and extremely useful for setting also the own ‘tax audit defense’ strategy. Important as their is a shift from direct to indirect taxation, increase of VAT rates and an increase of tax authority scrutiny are methods of government to balance their budgets.

Overview of Indirect Tax Objectives

Tax Planning: identify, recommend and successfully implement indirect tax projects that assist in achieving the objectives of the indirect tax department part of the business objectives.

Tax Accounting: proactively anticipate on changes in the business and outside the business and successfully communicate these changes to the concerning departments. Furthermore look after a correct implementation of these changes.

Tax Compliance: look after a correct, complete and timely Indirect Tax reporting of all entities. This includes that additional reporting relating to these Indirect Tax returns is taken into account.

Tax Governance: all corporate departments are well informed and/or have the availability of a VAT work instruction so it is clear when to consult the indirect tax department.

Support Other Departments: activities of departments that are being affected by VAT risks have been successfully identified and these departments have been well instructed to reduce these risks.

Audit Defense: roles and responsibilities have been determined who deals with the tax authorities during an audit (announcement) and tax authorities questions and procedures “how to act” (e.g. appoint one contact person, never provide documents without first making copies) have been documented and rolled out.

Tax Controversy Strategy: ‘Proactively Managing the Changing Landscape’

Developing a winning strategy to support your tax position requires having insight on how the tax authorities conducts their examination and anticipating their next move.

Some ‘Best Practice’ quotes

“be polite and cooperative, but don’t forget your rights, choose one room where auditors will be placed, don’t let them wander unattended (…) appoint one contact person to communicate with auditors and never provide documents without first making copies and list what has been handed over” Alexander Bychkov, Baker &McKenzie Russia

“give the auditor a presentation on the company and its business model to create trust” Nicole Looks, Baker &McKenzie Germany

A new trend: open dialogue between revenue bodies, taxpayers and tax intermediaries

The new trend is to have an open dialogue between revenue bodies, taxpayers and tax intermediaries. I refer to OECD promotion of ‘enhanced relationship’ (OECD report: Study Into The Role Of Tax Intermediaries). Even if the authorities have not embraced such an approach (yet), a proactive mode can not only safe time and money but result in a good relationship.

The Dutch ‘horizontal monitoring’

In 2005, the Netherlands Tax and Customs Administration (TCA) initiated a pilot ‘horizontal monitoring’ programme involving 20 of the country’s largest corporate taxpayers. At the core of the programme is a concerted effort by the TCA to build greater trust with this taxpayer constituency as a means of encouraging greater disclosure of tax uncertainties and risks.

The TCA and all participating taxpayers enter into a non-binding but written ‘agreement’, by which the taxpayer undertakes principally to “actively notify the Tax Administration of any issues with a possible and significant tax risk.” In turn, the TCA promises, having received such disclosure, to “state its views concerning any legal consequences” of the matters disclosed, and to “take into account real commercial deadlines” when doing so. Importantly, the agreement covers both uncertain tax positions taken by the taxpayer in the past, and those which it is contemplating taking in the future.

Responses to the programme have been generally positive, with the majority of participating taxpayers and of relevant tax collectors agreeing that it has resulted in more effective and efficient working relationships. (Source: OECD report: Study Into The Role of Tax Intermediaries)

Some similar initiatives of Tax Authorities

1. In 2005, the United States initiated a Compliance Assurance Process
2. In September 2005, the Irish Revenue Commissioners initiated their ‘Co- operative Compliance’ programme with large corporate taxpayers.
3. Budget 2009, Senior Accounting Officer sign off in the United Kingdom

Audit Defense – Key Considerations (overview via YouTube)

Watch Here Via YouTube an overview of the ‘Audit Defense – Key Considerations’

Richard’s other Big4 publications

• How to Execute A Tax Strategic Plan And Be Successful
• About Market Leadership And Non Traditional Competitors
• Centralized Business Models And ‘Indirect Tax Automation’
• How To Manage The Perception Of C-level And Realize Tax Objectives
• The Conflict Between ‘Actual To Budget’ Controls And ‘Budget-based Compensation Targets’
• About ‘Business Integrity And ‘Being Inspired’
• The Indirect Tax Profession Is Evolving From An Individual To A Team Sport
• Would European Value Added Tax Work For The United States?
• US VAT Introduction Versus The Proposed Changes Of The ‘European Union’ VAT System

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 Tax Controversy Strategy: ‘Proactively Managing The Changing Landscape’ appeared first on Big4.com.

By: Mary Werner, CPA, MOD, Big4 Guest Blogger  

“The great leaders are like the best conductors-

they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players.”

~Blaine Lee

Imagine you’re playing Leadership Jeopardy with Delegation as one of the categories.

“I’ll take Delegation for $500, Bob.” The answers could be any one of the following:

1.  “If you want something done right, do it yourself.”
2. “My team members are all too busy to take on more work.”
3. “I’m too busy to teach them the right way.”

The Question: What is: “Why don’t I delegate?”

I’ve heard these same worn out answers from my harried coaching clients. They’d rather work 25 hours a day than delegate to their eager and capable staff.

As leaders, we have two major priorities. Our first is to think strategically, crafting a plan and approach to solve our toughest problems. A second priority is to develop our teams to help us solve those problems.

But you don’t have time to do the first unless you’re committed to the second.

Leveraging leadership is all about giving yourself the opportunity to do what you do best, and making sure your teams can do the same. And you can’t do either without effective delegation.

So if we know we must delegate effectively to succeed, how can we move beyond thinking like the answers detailed above.

Here are 5 tips that you can use to begin to develop your leadership leverage:

1. Accept the fact that effective delegation is a leadership imperative and decide to improve your delegation skills immediately.  I’ve reviewed numerous position descriptions and competency models and completed scores of 360 interviews and assessments. In every case, effective delegation is a skill requirement for leaders at all levels. Don’t resist building this necessary skill.

2. Effective delegation involves understanding the competencies of your team.  Match the skills and abilities of the individual to the tasks to be delegated. Be patient. Know that they will not complete the task exactly like you would but that is the key part of their learning and development. Understand their focus for development. What is it that they want to learn to be more fulfilled? What do they need to learn to advance? Know how the delegated task fits their developmental needs.

3. Invest the time up front to make sure you teach them what they need to know to get them on their way.

• Clearly articulate your desired outcome.
• Clearly articulate the time expected for completion.
• Clearly articulate the deadline for project or task completion.

Giving blanket orders to “do what it takes” or “get it back to me sometime next week” only sets both parties up for frustration and potential failure. Time spent up front provides greater returns on your investment once the project is complete. And that’s the definition of leverage.

4. Don’t get caught in “upward delegation,” which occurs when your staff attempts to give the project back due to time constraints or lack of understanding. Encourage your staff to focus on solving the problem and taking responsibility to complete the work. This is their time to learn and your time to lead.

5. Thoroughly review the completed work and provide feedback, positive if it meets your needs or constructive if the results are less than you expect. This is not the time to just “let it go” and rework it yourself.

Effective delegation provides a win-win solution for you and your team members. As the leader, you have developed and empowered your team to be more comfortable in taking on additional responsibility. This frees up available time for you to think strategically and work on more complex challenges.

So, what holds you back from more effective delegation habits? How can you break through to realize this is a win-win for both you as the leader and your team members who must develop in order to move forward?

To your success,

Mary

Mary C. Werner, CPA, MOD, formerly with Ernst side of Ernst & Young, is the founder of Werner Coaching and Consulting, Inc., a practice that builds on her more than 25 years of accounting, business and financial consulting experience. Mary is especially skilled at coaching and consulting with CPAs and other business professionals who are interested in accelerating their personal and professional growth for breakthrough results.

The post 5 Tips for Effective Delegation appeared first on Big4.com.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” This French proverb originally created to describe 19th century French culture, might equally apply to 21st century Big 4 audit culture.

I’ve got more experience than I’m comfortable admitting-three years of Big 4, six years of Fortune 100 accounting and audit, then 25 or so years as a serial entrepreneur in the financial staffing industry. So, I’ve been all around the Big 4 for 35 or so years as an employee, a client, a vendor, an advisor and now a blogger. So I think I’m probably somewhat of an expert on manifestations of change in the Big 4 culture.

One thing most everyone agrees on is the dramatic impact of technology, regulation and litigation on the public accounting profession. The up or out culture that exists within Big 4 firms also applies in the business environment where those firms operate. Big 4 staff members cannot be faulted for believing they face unprecedented challenges in their daily work. The push to be better and faster, but price competitive, creates a culture of constant change. Not all the change has been positive. I recently read a Wall Street Journal article that severely criticized the accounting profession’s current culture.

“Over the last five years, the staid accounting profession has been transformed into a Darwinian jungle. The major accounting firms are reeling from a sharp rise in competition, shrinking audit business in the wake of client mergers, waves of litigation from disgruntled clients, and unprecedented layoffs and partner defections. Those who remain are finding that the law of survival of the fittest prevails over generally accepted behavioral principles.”

The accounting profession, especially the Big 4, has certainly had its share of tumultuous change during the past couple of decades. After a relatively quiet half century as the Big 8, then #4 Ernst & Young and #5 Arthur Young merged in 1989. This was quickly followed by the merger of Deloitte and Touche Ross to form the Big 6. This combined with the real estate driven recession of the late 80s – early 90s, which produced a blizzard of bank failures and mergers, created a very volatile period for CPAs.

In 1997, KPMG and Ernst & Young announced a merger that would create the largest accounting firm ever. But, it was never realized as regulators tied it up too long. In 1998 though, a Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand merger was quickly approved forming the Big 5.

Storm clouds were gathering as the 1990’s came to a close. As the Big 5’s consulting practices grew (sometimes consulting fees were exceeding audit fees) ethical issues started to arise as auditors sometimes found themselves reviewing their own firm’s work. Arthur Anderson created a separate consulting division in 1989 then completely divested the business creating Accenture in 2000. Then a series of accounting scandals in the early 2000s culminated in Arthur Anderson going out of business. This sent thousands of AA employees scurrying to secure employment. Whole practice groups and offices were quickly gobbled up by other large firms leaving AA an empty shell and creating the Big 4.

In response to accounting scandals, the 2002 Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), sometimes called the accountant’s full employment act, required a significant overhaul of audit methodology. SOX required management and external auditors to report on the adequacy of the company’s internal control system for financial reporting. SOX implementation was very costly as documenting and testing financial controls to the extent necessary to issue opinions on internal control required enormous additional effort .

The great recession of 2008-2009 brought more pressure on the profession as scapegoats were sought for Wall Street failures, investment scandals and burst real estate bubbles. CPA firms and their partners were being held ever more liable for public firm failures.

While life in the Big 4 in the 2010s may seem more challenging than ever, it’s good to study history for perspective. The recessions of 1974, 1982, 1990, 2000 and 2008 all created challenging work environments for Big 4 staffers. CPAs in all of these eras had good reason to believe they were being asked to do more work in less time than their predecessors. I remember living through each of these and thinking “the accounting world has changed and will never be the same again.”

The WSJ article referenced earlier would lead one to believe the profession is on the verge of calamity. That article was in the July 24,1991 WSJ edition. The article went on to state “the profession’s crisis is playing havoc with accountants’ lives…who have become so anxiety ridden their health is in peril.” Little did the author know of the mergers, scandals and regulatory crises that lie ahead.

Steve Barley CPA started his accounting career with Touche Ross in 1973 and has spent his entire career in and around Big 8,6,5,4 firms. Currently he is developing a job posting site for accountants at http://www.CPAstaffing.com. Follow on Twitter @CPAstaffing.

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This blog dots all the postings to the building blocks of the Indirect Tax Strategic Plan (by Richard Cornelisse) and shows what a best practice should look like. It not only about the plan to be produced, but also gives my view about implementation. That could mean that some bottlenecks have to be conquered first.

I start with the “Company’s Culture and Code of Conduct” as it is a top down approach.

This blog includes the highlights of the various postings tagged to these building blocks. More detail about how I see things can be read via clicking on the links.

Company’s Culture and Code of Conduct

From ‘Business Integrity And ‘Being Inspired’ (by Richard Cornelisse): If integrity is an important part of your organizations values, you should always act accordingly and proactively manage as leadership. It is always about doing the right thing and never bargain these values.

Leadership, Integrity, Trust…and Ski-Racing: “Without integrity, an organization is eventually doomed to failure–karma”

Greg Smith: “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs: “The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for…. To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money…I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.”

Maureen Broderick: ”In a profession that sells a promise of performance versus a tangible product or service, a firm’s vision, values, and culture lie at the heart of that promise. Vision is where the firm is headed. Values are the behaviors the firm holds important, and culture is the feel, the energy, the society within the organization. Collectively, they form the core around which the business is built.”

From ’The Conflict Between ‘Actual To Budget’ Controls And ‘Budget-based Compensation Targets’’ (by Richard Cornelisse):

“A Ferrari is a beautiful, very fast and a state of the art car, but we should not put Stevie Wonder in the driver seat. He is an excellent song writer and performer but he never ever will be the next Michael Schumacher. It will be risky business if he controls the throttle”

The above might be considered a ridiculous example, but strangely enough happens often in our daily practice. The downturn might even make it worse. Why? It is because of budget-based incentive targets.

Everybody feels now the pressure and the focus is on making personal budget first. We might know the best driver, understand that he is the best option, but that does not mean we want Michael actually in the driver seat. It does not matter if Michael works for the same company or that it is in the best interest of the client. Stevie, wants to make his own comfort zone first. It is in his personal interest.

• Should we be surprised?
• Is this not part of our human nature?
• Is that not the reason we have our company culture?

Exactly, the reason why proactive management of common values is needed.

Business Strategy

The Tax Function has to contribute value to the company’s business strategy. What is the impact on business strategy of social media and technology developments and the market entry of non traditional competitors.   Are new business priorities needed?

From ”About Market Leadership And Non Traditional Competitors“ (by Richard Cornelisse): The current impact of Google and Wikipedia is already huge as much content has become less valuable or even worthless from a pricing perspective. Will search engine functionality develop further? Will more content be available and contributed on the Internet?

Adrienne Graham: “With the Internet being so widely available loaded with free information, people automatically assume that you too have to provide information for free. My response to that is go ahead and read the free stuff. But when you still find yourself lacking answers, then apparently the FREE stuff doesn’t work. You can’t come to a professional and ask them to work for free. In essence, that is what you’re doing when you ask to pick someone’s brain. How would you feel if your boss came to you and said, Hey since we can get this done from information from the Internet, I won’t be paying you today. Go ahead, let it sink in. Got that visual yet? Good. That’s exactly how I feel whenever someone wants to take me to lunch or call me to pick my brain”

Benchmarking

From A Spotlight On “Management”: About Being Ambitious And Realizing Goals (by Richard Cornelisse): Negative experiences but also 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’

From ‘The Value of Benchmarking: Get Some Objective Evidence” (by Richard Cornelisse): 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” (by Richard Cornelisse)
• “Why Manage Indirect Taxes” (by Richard Cornelisse)
• “Indirect Tax Exposures Others Have Faced” (by Richard Cornelisse)
• “Audit Defense“
• “System For Dummies“
• “Surveys And research“

Setting the objectives

From Setting The Objectives Of The Indirect Function (by Richard Cornelisse):

• Tax Planning: identify, recommend and successfully implement indirect tax projects that assist in achieving the objectives of the indirect tax department part of the business objectives.
• Tax Accounting: proactively anticipate on changes in the business and outside the business and successfully communicate these changes to the concerning departments. Furthermore look after a correct implementation of these changes.
• Tax Compliance: look after a correct, complete and timely Indirect Tax reporting of all entities. This includes that additional reporting relating to these Indirect Tax returns is taken into account.
• Tax Governance: all corporate departments are well informed and/or have the availability of a VAT work instruction so it is clear when to consult the indirect tax department.
• Support Other Departments: activities of departments that are being affected by VAT risks have been successfully identified and these departments have been well instructed to reduce these risks.
• Audit Defense: roles and responsibilities have been determined who deals with the tax authorities during an audit (announcement) and tax authorities questions and procedures “how to act” (e.g. never provide documents without first making copies) have been documented and rolled out.

From A Spotlight on “Management”: About Being Ambitious And Realizing Goals (by Richard Cornelisse): At the moment that these objectives are validated,  specific goals have to be set within these boundaries. The goals have to be specific, measurable, acceptable, realistic and timely (SMART goals).

Getting support and the tools to make it happen

From ”How To Manage the Perception of C-level And Realize Tax Objectives“ (by Richard Cornelisse): In order to allocate resources to risk and reward areas that matter, the maximum level of risk appetite of the company in the worst case scenarios need to be determined. This facilitates such prioritization as defined acceptable levels of risk means that resources do not spend time on further reducing risks that are already at an acceptable level.

If you know the risk appetite, you have to identify the lowest performing indirect tax processes that have the most direct impact on the company’s business objectives (e.g. benchmark and measure). Short problem statements for the gaps found should be written. It should include an estimate of savings or the amount of hours currently lost due to rework. These statements can subsequently be prioritized and validated with top management. Various solutions are presented with cost benefit analysis, so a constructive discussion with top management can be held about what is needed to close these gaps (e.g. budget and/or resources needed or necessary change of systems, processes and controls etc).

In the worse case the gap(s) will not be closed, but at least you have achieved mutual awareness and hopefully responsibility. However, if the problem is material and addressed in the right way it more than likely it will be dealt accordingly. Why? It has become now a mutual responsibility.

From ”VAT Throughput – Calculating The Taxes“ (by Richard Cornelisse and Kelvin Hulsebos): Insight in the amount of VAT that globally has to be paid or recovered is important for creating proper internal awareness (top down, peers and bottom up), determining the risk appetite of the company and monitor as indirect tax function trends and changes. Throughput gives some insight where the scarce resources of the tax function should focus on.

Change Management:  legislative change

Tracking relevant changes across the globe can be realized via regularly monitoring these Website links (e.g. latest country updates, Global VAT rates and VIES validation, etc). Check this Blog’s Indirect Tax Newsreader often.

Richard’s postings about management of legislative change:

• “VAT Rate Increase Results In Extra Saving“ (by Richard Cornelisse)
• “European Commission – Greenpaper On The Future Of VAT – Towards A Simpler, More Robust And Efficient VAT System“ (by Richard Cornelisse)
• “Would Europe’s Value Added Tax Work For The United States” (by Richard Cornelisse and Kelvin Hulsebos)
• “My Own View” ((by Richard Cornelisse)
• “About US Tax Reform – Larry Lindsey, Former Fed Governor: “A Value Added Tax Should Be On The Table” (by Richard Cornelisse)
• “US VAT introduction: Any Lessons To Be Learned From European VAT Fraud?“ (by Richard Cornelisse and Kelvin Hulsebos)

Change Management:  business change

From a tax perspective the difference between future firefighting or being in control has to do with being involved and the timing of that involvement. A tight connection to the business units and their decision-making process is essential. Leading practice example re non routine transactions by Richard Cornelisse:

• Merger And Acquisition – Integration And Indirect Tax: Managing The Moving Parts Before, During And After A Transaction (by Richard Cornelisse )
• The intersection Of VAT And Shared Service Centers. A Site For Global Savings Or A Source For Worldwide Risk? (by Richard Cornelisse and Katie Downs)

Structure the tax function and people development

From ”The Indirect Tax Profession Is Evolving From An Individual To A Team Sport“ (by Richard Cornelisse): Due to all technological developments it is already part of our present and future. A tax technical advice has to be implemented in systems, processes and controls.  Instructions have to be given to people outside the tax function.  Alignment with the business is key for the tax function to plan in time and avoid future firefighting.

In order to challenge and support a client in his mission an adviser should besides excellent technical skills have a good understanding of communication and collaboration, project management, change management, information technology, negotiation and leadership.

These competences overall are needed to be successful. This is not only applicable for the individual adviser, but as well for an organization with the aim to achieve or maintain market leadership. It is simply no longer possible to excel in everything re global indirect tax management. That means that certain people excel in certain areas of indirect tax and the outcome of the overall team effort will make the real difference from a quality standard perspective.

Jack Welch: ”Break down barriers and improve teamwork up, down, and across organizational lines.  A considerable amount of money is lost due to disconnects or competition between groups that should be working for a common cause: providing value to customers”

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 How to Execute A Tax Strategic Plan And Be Successful appeared first on Big4.com.

I recently placed a candidate in a considerably lower level role than I normally do. Most of my recruiting assignments are for senior level positions with experienced executives. It’s always personally rewarding to enhance someone’s career, both professionally, financially and personally, but this recent placement gave me a different buzz. One I remember liking from earlier in my own career. It’s the great feeling of making a difference in someone’s life, probably one they’ll always remember and knowing I helped create a turning point in their careers.

This also put me in mind of experiences placing  candidates coming directly out of Big 4 for the first time. I did my fair share of these transitions in the good old pre-IPO, pre-SOX days, circa mid-late 1990’s. Hard to believe the many changes that have occurred since, from Enron to the great recession. The one thing that hasn’t changed though is how young talent feels, making the leap of faith from a public accounting firm to private industry. I’m quite sure attorneys and accountants struggle with some of the same questions when leaving the world of prominent law firms and the Big 4. After all, they’ve been groomed for success and high expectations, pitted against their peers for recognition, fostered in an environment of similar professionals; all hard working, bright and ambitious up and comers. Some see a clear path towards partnership while others dread yet another busy season.

And then someone like me comes along – whispering in their ear of opportunity, title, compensation increases, the chance to have a more structured lifestyle. Maybe they’ll work just as hard, after all I believe cranking out the hours is just ingrained in the Big 4 psyche. Regardless of the inducement, there comes a time when the right opportunity hits a nerve and the considerations of change come into play.

What makes transitioning out of Big 4 so different? In addition to their accounting firm experience usually being their first role out of a college they were recruited from, there’s the comfort level of professional commonality and equality. Everyone starts off in a comparable position, with similar skills and education. Everyone is working towards the same goal. Expectations are set and met; there are mentors and an established pattern for growth.

It’s no wonder the thought of leaving the prestigious society created in their firms is such a difficult decision. Here the CPA can rely on mentorship, interesting work and variety. Their peers share the same workload, similar challenges and are bound together in a culture of hard work and long hours. And even though they have worked with and alongside their clients, going to work for them is a completely different ball game. Contemplating submitting their work for the Auditors to review, getting involved in everything from journal entries to financials and often a big challenge in learning how to motivate and lead non professional staff.  Leaving the cocoon of a big 4 environment is a daunting proposition and let’s face it – Managers and Partners will always encourage their star performers to stay.

Despite all the inducements to stay (excluding the long hours!), Big 4 talent often does make it’s way into the private sector. Most do it successfully, embracing private industry, thriving in new challenges and learning how to lead and motivate. Transitioning into the corporate world is almost a right of passage. Their talent is welcomed and embraced whichever side of the fence they ultimately choose.

Cindy Cremona, CPC has over twenty years experience as an Executive Recruiter. Her main focus is in Accounting and Finance, primarily placing senior level roles for clients mainly in the technology sectors.

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This Blog is about managing the perception of C-level and realize own tax objectives. Writing a set of standard indirect tax objectives is not that difficult. It is a paper exercise. Why? At the moment that these objectives are validated, specific goals have to be set within these boundaries. The goals have to be specific, measurable, acceptable, realistic and timely (SMART goals).  You need to know where you want to go and set up a roadmap how to get there. The next steps is to sell this within the own organization in order to get access to the tools to make it happen. That might mean: “Managing the perception of C-level”.

Benchmarking

Benchmark against trends in the market could be supportive. It provides an overview of the experiences of others and is useful for setting own priorities going forward. This is the first step, measuring ongoing performance the next.

The Indirect Tax Strategic Plan has various building blocks. To make it more user-friendly, the benchmark findings I gathered from Big4 surveys, are tagged to these building blocks.

Watch Here Via YouTube

The root cause of defects

If you look at the overall picture some defects shown are the cause effect of other defects. Based on these finding, the root cause is likely the company’s culture, organizational structure, overall business processes and/or maybe a wrong perception of top management about indirect tax.

This follows from this ‘top down’ overview:

• Executive considering indirect tax not material and a high priority. The low risks evaluation of indirect tax likely results in budget constraints
• Lack of specific VAT/GST measurable performance goals visible to the CFO
• Lack of proper prioritization between lower value activities and higher value activities. Indirect Tax function has many competing priorities and insufficient time or resources
• Historically, the tax function in general focused on other areas, allowing other departments and local offices a free hand to deal with the company’s indirect taxes
• Finance and Accounting is in the majority considered accountable for Indirect Tax
• It seems that the indirect tax department is often the last to know what is going on, is forced to be the show stopper when other parts of the business thought they were are ready to ‘go live’

I refer to my guest Blog ‘The Conflict Between ‘Actual To Budget’ Controls And ‘Budget-based Compensation Targets’. That Blog dealt with company’s culture, business objectives and the conflict sometimes of personal performance targets.

Some governance and mandate needed first

If you know 1) the current state, 2) where you want to go and 3) have set up a roadmap how to get there, it is important to get a clear view of what is needed to meet these goals.

Someone wrote in literature that the first step to improve indirect tax management is to put someone in charge. Is it that easy or is that an example of one minute managership.

Assume that the significant majority of the findings are applicable to your organization. Do you want to have end responsibility under these circumstances?  Is delegating end responsibility to a new recruited global or regional leader going to contribute any positive change?

Having the responsibility without the tools is like being Michael Schumacher without a car. Not likely you are going to win a Formula One race. That means an unhappy Michael.

Accountability for indirect tax is often still in Finance & Accounting.  If you look at the findings is it likely that top management is going to support any change via issuing new policies about governance and mandate? More important, provide the new recruited or appointed indirect tax leader with the necessary tools for success such as:

• Budget
• Extra resources
• Performance evaluation of people who work outside the tax function but has a role in managing indirect taxes  (e.g. people in the finance function preparing VAT return, Shared Service Center staff re posting of AP invoices).

Without such support being end responsibility is in my view not a favorable position. If culture or organizational structure has to change, involvement of top management is mandatory. Without their support you will be on a mission impossible.

How to get their support?

Being effective and efficient at the same time

Is being fully compliant a realistic goal?

Effectiveness is the degree to which organization meets and exceeds the needs and requirement of their customer. When is effectiveness achieved? For the tax function if all risks are managed and opportunities spotted and implemented.

As indirect tax resources are normally scarce it is important that the available time is used in the most efficient and effective way. I refer to the findings about competing priorities and insufficient time or resources. Besides that managing all risks is cost inefficient and will have impact on efficiency beyond indirect tax.

Efficiency refers to the amount of resources consumed in being effective. Efficiency can be measured in time, cost, labor, or value. It is about being efficient and effective at the same time and therefore about making the right choices.

In order to allocate resources to risk and reward areas that matter, the maximum level of risk appetite of the company in the worst case scenarios need to be determined. This facilitates such prioritization as defined acceptable levels of risk means that resources do not spend time on further reducing risks that are already at an acceptable level.

Speaking the language of C-level

What are the requirements of client satisfaction of the C-level. Based on the above it seems that C-level consider indirect tax of lower priority than often the indirect tax function does. Is the cause effect misinterpretation or not understanding and speaking the same language?

The first step – to achieve mutual understanding – is to get agreement with top management on the level of indirect tax risk appetite of the company in the worse case scenario.

What do we know further about C-level?

They have to manage a lot and that means that prioritization is part of their natural skill set. It is about measure of risk and opportunity (selection via being material or not) and if indeed material what is needed to make it happen (balancing costs against gain).

If you know the risk appetite, you have to identify the lowest performing indirect tax processes that have the most direct impact on the company’s business objectives (e.g. benchmark and measure).  Short problem statements for the gaps found should be written. It should include an estimate of savings or the amount of hours currently lost due to rework. These statements can subsequently be prioritized and validated with top management.

Various solutions are presented with cost benefit analysis, so a constructive discussion with top management can be held about what is needed to close these gaps (e.g. budget and/or resources needed or necessary change of systems, processes and controls etc).

In the worse case the gap(s) will not be closed, but at least you have achieved mutual awareness and hopefully responsibility. However, if the problem is material and addressed in the right way it more than likely it will be dealt accordingly.  Why? It has become now a mutual responsibility.

How do you see this? Do you agree?

Richard’s other Big4 publications

• How to Execute A Tax Strategic Plan And Be Successful
• About Market Leadership And Non Traditional Competitors
• Centralized Business Models And ‘Indirect Tax Automation’
• The Conflict Between ‘Actual To Budget’ Controls And ‘Budget-based Compensation Targets’
• Tax Controversy Strategy: ‘Proactively Managing The Changing Landscape’
• About ‘Business Integrity And ‘Being Inspired’
• The Indirect Tax Profession Is Evolving From An Individual To A Team Sport
• Would European Value Added Tax Work For The United States?
• US VAT Introduction Versus The Proposed Changes Of The ‘European Union’ VAT System

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 How To Manage The Perception of C-level And Realize Tax Objectives appeared first on Big4.com.

By: Mary Werner, CPA, MOD, Big4 Guest Blogger                                           

 “I believe through learning and application of what you learn,

you can solve any problem,

overcome any obstacle and achieve any goal

 that you can set for yourself.”

~Brian Tracy

High potential?

The words “high potential” spark debate in corporations and professional firms in the U.S. and across the globe. What does it mean to be a “high potential?” How do companies identify high-potential employees?

Research and results from varying organizations are inconclusive. And the criteria for naming a high potential employee varies between organizations. But that shouldn’t stop you from seeking out opportunities to learn the new skills, behaviors and attributes that will place you squarely on the road required for leadership at higher and higher levels.

The dictionary defines the word POTENTIAL as “capable of being or becoming” and “having possibility.”HIGH, of course is defined as “exceeding the common degree or measure.”  So high-potential employees continually perform at high levels and most importantly have the capacity and attitude to take on more challenges. They are willing and eager to learn new skills in response to tough and changing circumstances. Do these attributes describe you?

It’s often said that technical competence and cognitive intelligence are only the baseline or entry point for the high potential. We’ve all seen smart, technical employees flame out on their way to the leadership ranks because they either cannot or are unwilling to learn and develop new skills. Research completed by Michael M. Lombardo and Robert W. Eichinger and published in an article titled, High Potentials as High Learners, identifies how important “learning agility” is to an employee’s high performance. (Human Resource Management, Winter 2000, Vol.39, No.4, pp 321-330) They also describe behaviors and attributes that separate high performers from the rest of their peers.

In June of 2010, Harvard Business Review published an article written by Douglas Ready, Jay Conger and Linda Hill titled, “Are You a High Potential?” in which the authors articulated many of the same attributes as were identified in 2000.

Based on that research, I’ve adapted the following self-assessment to help you focus on the behaviors and attributes that will place you further on the road to new and challenging leadership opportunities. Use it as your personal check-list to identify areas for growth and development.

Your “High-Potential” Self Assessment

1. I know myself well and continually explore my own self-development.
2. I actively seek out and want more new and challenging experiences to learn from.
3. I ask for and welcome feedback to change my behavior and learn new viewpoints.
4. I’m cool and resilient under pressures of change.
5. I inspire others to perform beyond normal.
6. I am comfortable with complexity and ambiguity.
7. I am very curious and have a passion for learning new skills and ideas.
8. I am not afraid to make mistakes and when I do, I learn from my experience.
9. I am focused on getting results through others by building trust and credibility and maintaining effective personal relationships.
10. I have an ability to see the big picture and operate in tune with my organization’s culture and values.
11. I won’t sacrifice my personal integrity to get ahead.
12. I’m proactive, ready and willing to make a decision and act on it.
13. I’m not satisfied with the status quo.

We’re looking for “yes” answers to the above attributes and behaviors. And while many of us don’t have all these attributes nailed, high-potential employees possess many of them and in a balance that allows them to outshine their peers. So if you want to be considered a high-potential employee in your firm, ask yourself honestly if you display these characteristics.

The good news is that these skills can be learned. I have coached numerous high-potential CPA firm leaders who are looking to broaden their base of skills and further hone the skills they already possess. These attributes do not “stand alone,” but rather, are an integral part of your daily work experience.

Whether you engage a coach, seek out a mentor, or pursue new and more challenging work in your current firm or elsewhere, ultimately the choice to learn and grow is yours. 

Mary C. Werner, CPA, MOD, formerly with Ernst & Young, is the founder of Werner Coaching and Consulting, Inc., a practice that builds on her more than 25 years of accounting, business and financial consulting experience. Mary is especially skilled at coaching and consulting with CPAs and other business professionals who are interested in accelerating their personal and professional growth for breakthrough results.

The post Your “High-Potential” Checklist: Assess Yourself and See Where You Stand appeared first on Big4.com.

My Guest Blog of March 13, 2012 “About US Tax Reform – Larry Lindsey, Former Fed Governor: A Value Added Tax Should Be On The Table” dealt with US VAT introduction as possible option to combat the deficit.

This Guest Blog is about the malfunctions of that “European” VAT systems and proposed improvements.  Based on the law of the handicap of a head start if indeed it is decided to implement a national US Value Added Tax,  it is better to implement “the  remediated” version and improve further of course.

The European Commission – objective statement about future of VAT

“Value added tax (VAT) constitutes a major source of revenue for national budgets of the Member States of the European Union. However, the VAT system, which is based on legislation adopted at European level and applied at national level, suffers from numerous shortcomings which do not make it fully efficient and compatible with the requirements of a true single market.

The aim of this consultation is to launch a broad based debate with all the stakeholders on the evaluation of the current VAT system and the possible ways forward to strengthening its coherence with the single market and its capacity as a revenue raiser whilst reducing the cost of compliance. 

The Green Paper covers in particular the treatment of cross border supplies, as well as other key issues addressing tax neutrality, the degree of harmonisation required in the single market and reducing “red tape” whilst ensuring VAT revenues for Member States”

The European Commission published its Final Report Dated December 6, 2011.

VAT future: simpler, more robust and efficient

An Extract Of Ernst And Young Tax Alert – Click Here For Complete Briefing 

“To move the current VAT to the future system, the Commission wants to implement the following short-term measures as a first step: 

• Setting up an EU VAT web portal that provides information in several languages on basic issues such as registration, invoicing, VAT returns, VAT rates, special obligations and limitations to the right of deduction
• In 2012, publishing the Guidelines agreed by the VAT Committee on EU legislation and explanatory notes on the new legislation before its entry into force, in order to inform businesses 
• Setting up a tripartite EU VAT forum (involving the Commission, Member states, and stakeholders) in the course of 2012
• Proposing a standardized VAT declaration (VAT Return) to be available in all languages and optional for businesses across the EU by 2013
• Ensuring the smooth introduction of the mini one-stop shop scheme (registration in a single EU Member State) in 2015 and envisaging a managed broadening of the concept from 2015 onward - Ernst & Young

I have a lot of questions and to be honest hardly any concrete answers. That is not that strange as we need more detail first. It is maybe all too soon, but we know that a small (legislative) change can have a big impact.

Can you imagine the impact when you completely change an entire VAT system, such as abandon the ‘origin principle’ and replace that by ‘destination principle’. I am aware of the VAT jargon used but to simplify, it means that the country that is allowed to tax the transaction changes. All supplies will be taxed for VAT in the country where the supply to the final consumer occurs. Systems, processes and detective and preventive controls will have to be amended.

It is about being well prepared, look at the bigger picture, plan and set already some key priorities where possible.

The EU VAT web portal, Guidelines and tripartite EU VAT forum are good initiatives and fit in the trend of tax authorities having an open dialogue with the tax payer. I refer to OECD ‘Enhanced Relationship’. Such a portal might for many tax authorities be the first baby steps to go in the direction of such an ‘enhanced relationship’. I am the opinion that such a relationship is the right strategically way for the authorities to manage that tax payer’s are in compliance with tax law and reporting requirements.

For every positive, there might be a negative that needs proactive management.  Does an open dialogue negatively impact tax risk management? Does it result in an increase of tax risks? That could be if such a dialogue results in for example higher penalties or an increased risk of (joint) liabilities. Will tax payer’s”Good Faith” towards the authorities even more difficult to prove? If you receive ‘how to do it’ instructions (EU VAT portal, Guidelines), can you still take the position that you could not have known? I don’t think so.

• How do you see this?
• What is the impact on company’s processes and controls?
• How do you see the trend of ‘enhanced relationship’ develop?
• What is the impact on Tax service offerings in general’?
• What can we expect more?

The above EU VAT Code is a regulation to replace the present VAT Directive. A directive has to be translated in national regulation first and that has as cause effect that Member States might have different views or interpretations. Root cause is delegation of authority. Besides that some ‘directive’ provisions are optional and that means that not in every country the same VAT rules apply.

A VAT code applies directly in all Member States as it becomes national law immediately and would increase harmonization between the Member States. Flexibility in view, interpretation or the optional model does in principle no longer exist. At least that is the aim of such an EU VAT code.

It triggers already the following questions:

• Is the playing field of the future indirect tax professional going to expand from an one country ‘VAT’ expertise to an European Union league perspective?
• How about litigation and national interpretation of the code? Nowadays the national court decides whether questions are raised to European Court of Justice, will that change?
• What is the impact of collaboration among tax administration?
• What about cultural differences from a people perspective?
• What is the impact on tax profession as in-house tax function can use its own indirect tax expertise in 27 countries?
• What is the cost benefit analysis on setting up an own in-house function indirect tax function compared to an outsource model to external advisers?

When is change going to take place?

I am aware that many questions are taking it too far. But if you consider this a brainstorm exercise you need to post first as many ideas as possible.  The next phase is about categorizing and selecting.

We don’t have to hurry as this will take a couple of years before this gets into force. It is all about politics and the right timing again. Last but not least at the end the Council of all Ministers have to approve.  The real political challenge would be to first agree on and implement the ‘All for One and One for All’ principle. A bottleneck could be the competition for tax revenues and the perception that somebody else wins. When somebody wins, somebody else must lose.

Back to the US introduction

Is the above also a bottleneck for the US?

Maybe everybody could learn something from the Canadian system.

“A benefit of an Canadian HST-styled VAT for the US is that the federal government computes the tax attributable to each province through a formula (based on census data, other economic indicators). There is no need for businesses or the tax authority to separately track the taxes of each province on returns or on invoices. As a result, such a VAT structure can more easily accommodate states wishing to have different rates from each other (which could well be a deal breaker otherwise). That said, it is of course simpler if the individual states all buy in to the same rate — if the rate is the same, and there is an HST-type formula driven revenue allocation to states, there would be less need to develop complex place of supply rules to determine which state’s VAT rate applies.”  Brian Wurts, PwC Canada

Richard’s other Big4 publications

• How to Execute A Tax Strategic Plan And Be Successful
• About Market Leadership And Non Traditional Competitors
• Centralized Business Models And ‘Indirect Tax Automation’
• How To Manage The Perception Of C-level And Realize Tax Objectives
• The Conflict Between ‘Actual To Budget’ Controls And ‘Budget-based Compensation Targets’
• Tax Controversy Strategy: ‘Proactively Managing The Changing Landscape’
• About ‘Business Integrity And ‘Being Inspired’
• The Indirect Tax Profession Is Evolving From An Individual To A Team Sport
• Would European Value Added Tax Work For The United States?

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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By Maureen Broderick, Big4.com Guest Blogger

For a professional service firm, vision, values, and culture are really 99 percent of the equation.” Damien O’Brien, CEO, Egon Zehnder

In a profession that sells a promise of performance versus a tangible product or service, a firm’s vision, values, and culture lie at the heart of that promise. Vision is where the firm is headed. Values are the behaviors the firm holds important, and culture is the feel, the energy, the society within the organization. Collectively, they form the core around which the business is built. The most successful professional service firms treat this interconnected trio as strategic assets and powerful growth drivers. Who you are and what you value and seek to preserve as an organization affects every aspect of your firm’s performance and growth: how your firm is structured; how it governs and shares profits; how it recruits, trains, and manages people; and, ultimately, how it positions and brands itself in the marketplace.

Each firm that I’ve belonged to or consulted for has had a distinct look and feel, personality, and work ethic — its own signature style and organizational DNA. And like the interwoven strands of DNA, each organization has been shaped by a myriad of factors: internally by its history, the type of people it hires, and how it acculturates them, and externally by how it interacts with clients and the markets it serves. Taken together, all these factors create a unique and potent mix or, as one managing partner described it, “that secret sauce that defines the firm.”

Interestingly, although all organizations have distinct DNA, the over 100 professional service firms that we researched for my book, The Art of Managing Professional Services, have amazingly similar core values — even to the point of using the exact same words on their value statements. The top values mentioned — integrity, collaboration, client focus, professionalism, and respect — speak to a collective passion for and dedication to their respective professions, colleagues, and clients. Achieving a high degree of professionalism, quality, and excellence in their work is the primary motivator for most professionals.

It’s easy to say that collaboration and teamwork are important, but it’s quite another thing to truly live by and enforce these values. The ability to embed and preserve values over time is one of the distinguishing characteristics of a successful firm. During our interviews, we found that leading firms share common qualities when it comes to reinforcing their values and expectations:

Commit the time and resources to identifying core principles and drivers

“If you don’t get this stuff right, you might as well forget the rest of it. You are going to be just another organization.”  Anonymous

In a nutshell, successful firms have clearly defined visions, well-articulated values, and shared ways of behaving that bind their professionals across geographies and disciplines. Such clarity is no accident, but the product of commitment at all levels. Agreeing on vision and values is a highly collaborative, inclusive process; all partners typically weigh in. Vision and values are periodically reviewed and updated to reflect changes in firm dynamics and to reinvigorate the firm’s commitment to its direction and ethos.

Align strategy with vision and values

In the top firms, all major decisions around structure, governance, compensation, talent, services, and clients are aligned with the firm’s vision and values. Strategic planning — both long-term and annual — is viewed as the execution tool that drives the firm toward its vision and aspirational goals. The close linkage among vision, values, and strategic planning ensures that the firm “walks the talk” and remains true to its core principles, however they are defined — even under enormous external pressure.

Ensure that expansion doesn’t destroy or dilute values and culture

As firms grow larger and more globally complex, core values and culture can be put at risk. Organic growth, mergers and acquisitions, new service offerings, and surges in staff size can all test a firm’s organizational resiliency and affect its behavioral norms and day-to-day operating environment. The best firms ensure that expansion has a positive rather than negative impact on core drivers. They use teaming, training, and mentoring to infuse cultural norms and values, promote consistent client service standards, and embed their core principles and behavioral expectations throughout the firm (see Teaming at Cravath for an example of the power of teams).

Cultivate and reinforce their culture

“Many people think of culture as a soft thing. I see it as a very hard, strategic asset.” Anonymous

Savvy firms spend impressive amounts of time, money, and resources embedding their values and reinforcing their cultures using a variety of channels, tools, policies, and procedures. It is a constant, repetitive process to inculcate the values and culture — “the water dripping on stone approach,” as one managing partner put it. The instilling process typically begins with recruiting and is reaffirmed formally and informally through orientation and ongoing training, teaming, meetings and events, and prolific communications. Adherence to values and culture is often publicly rewarded and celebrated, while failure to follow the rules is critiqued and punished. And yes, some firms do have their values emblazoned on cubes and walls and “in thirty to forty languages on our screensavers.” But for most, such public displays are just the beginning. It’s not about showcasing core values and culture. It’s about making them work.

Monitor and measure adherence to values and cultural drivers

“We place a lot of weight on shaping, nurturing, and enforcing our values and culture.”  Bob Dell, Chairman and Managing Partner, Latham & Watkins

In successful firms, adherence to values is firmly rooted and rewarded; failure to embrace them can lead to expulsion. Performance criteria clearly establish expectations around values, and professionals are evaluated and compensated based on performance against goals.

Most successful professional service firms continue to embody the spirit of their original founders. However, the world does change, and many firms periodically review and fine-tune their vision, values, and culture. The goal is to ensure that their core principles and operating style continue to reflect both the evolution of their partnerships and changing client needs.

Such renewal initiatives usually are driven by some inflection point within the firm or a disruption or change in the competitive landscape or in the marketplace. Traditional ways of working may become obsolete, and significant changes to governance, services, and culture are required to ensure continued viability. Intense mergers and acquisitions activity over a prolonged period may result in cultural misalignments that require radical adjustment. Or, as frequently happens, growth surges and the drive to globalize may strain and dilute a firm’s existing culture.

Whatever the trigger, the process that firms undertake to revisit their fundamentals is typically intense, involving the entire firm and an enormous amount of management time. Collaboration and consensus are important components, and many leaders agree that the process of coming together to establish or reaffirm the vision and values is often as important as the result. It is an opportunity to unite and focus the organization on a common path.

Although each firm has its own signature operating style, an initiative to revisit a firm’s core values and path typically includes five major components:

1. Solicit feedback from the partnership and clients
2. Envision how you want the firm to be
3. Scope the changes required to achieve the vision
4. Map an action strategy
5. Promote buy-in

Culture change is rooted in changes in behavior. To encourage the new behaviors you want, be sure that your rewards-and-recognition system reinforces them at all levels. Reassuring everyone that their contributions count invites them to think of themselves as creative change agents who matter. Treat change as the key to thriving and heightening performance — and as a journey rather than a destination.

Maureen Broderick is founder and CEO of Broderick & Company (www.broderickco.com), a consulting firm specializing in strategy, research, and training for professional services. The Art of Managing Professional Services was published in November 2010 by Wharton School Publishing. Maureen now blogs on professional services management.

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By: Mary Werner, CPA, MOD Big4.com Guest Blogger

I’m OK. You’re OK. That’s the title of a popular self-help book written in the late 1960’s. But now, in 2012, those words remind me of the ultimate goal of effective feedback: an experience where each party leaves the conversation feeling “OK” and focused on moving forward.

I know it’s a lofty goal. The feedback process is often a challenge for both the giver and receiver. As an Executive Coach, one of my most important roles is to provide constructive feedback to my coaching clients. And providing that feedback, while supporting and encouraging my client, is a delicate dance. In your role as Big4 leader, you face the challenge daily as you work to develop the technical and leadership skills of your direct reports.

But feedback, both positive and negative, is a form of communication that is integral to our learning and development, regardless of whether we are on the giving or receiving end. And at its roots, giving and receiving feedback is a skill that great leaders must continually practice and work to perfect.

When done right, providing constructive and useful feedback to someone else can pave the way to their outstanding performance. The result of the experience is instructive to the receiver’s learning and growth.  You are communicating to the receiver, YOU are “OK,” but maybe your behavior, actions or technical performance are currently not.

One of my CPA coaching clients shared the positive results when he confronted the disruptive behavior of one of his employees. He had previously laid the groundwork of trust and a culture of respect and accountability so his feedback was favorably received.

When the feedback is botched, however, relationships are strained and productivity tanks. If you’re the giver, you lose the opportunity to motivate and develop your staff. If you’re on the receiving end, you’re turned off and tune out.

Because the feedback process is a critical element to our role as leaders, I’ve compiled a list of 10 “best practices” for giving and receiving feedback.

For the Giver

1.      When preparing yourself for the feedback conversation, tune into your skill of empathy. Imagine that you are on the receiving end of your comments and craft your message accordingly.

2.      Set the stage for the feedback conversation so your employee is mentally prepared for it.  For best results, set a location that is private and power neutral.

Try this: “I’d like to have a conversation with you about the meeting today. Will this time work?” Or just simply, “When you have a minute, I’d like to give you some feedback on the report you submitted.”

3.      State the behavior, observation or situation objectively. Be as specific and factual as possible. Avoid making inferences or stating opinions which are easily debatable and less useful for the listener.

Try this: “When you came late to the meeting….” Or, “I noted 4 errors on this spreadsheet.”

4.      Communicate the significance of the situation. Share the impact of your employee’s behavior, error or actions on your stakeholders, team or organization.

Try this: “The customer was disappointed the project was delivered late.” Or, “Others on the team felt disrespected.” Or, “The errors cost a loss in confidence in the quality of the total project.”

5.      Dialogue with your staff about possible solutions to the situation. Ask for their perspective on how they could resolve the situation.

Try this: “How can we prevent this from happening again?” Or, “How do you see this?” or, “What thoughts do you have on this situation?”

6.      Express your sincere interest in your employee’s development and confidence in their abilities. Ongoing feedback, especially positive feedback, is crucial for his or her development. It is one of your fundamental responsibilities as a leader.

For the Receiver

7.      Remember to approach your overall role as one of a continuous learner. This attitude will set you up to welcome the feedback process with open arms. We all have skills, behaviors or technical expertise that we can improve.

 8.      Listen to the feedback and consider the possible truth in what you are hearing. Avoid defensiveness at all costs.

9.      Clarify what you’re hearing. If you’re not sure what you’re hearing, ask for specific examples or clarification that will help you understand the feedback you’re receiving.

 10.  THANK the giver. We know it often takes courage to speak candidly. Remember, without feedback, we operate in a vacuum and cut ourselves off from our own growth and development.

Giving and receiving feedback should be a regular habit and not just a semi-annual or yearly event. Establishing a culture of trust, respect and connection is the starting point for the feedback conversation and your “communication” in these areas happens daily. The result is a mutually positive relationship where both parties feel “I’m OK and You’re OK.”

Mary Werner, CPA, MOD formerly worked in the Toledo and Cleveland offices of Ernst & Young and now provides Executive Coaching  to CPA firm leaders to accelerate their success.

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In one of my blogs on my personal website, I took the position that the tax profession evolves from an individual sport to a team sport. It is no longer possible to excel in everything re global tax management. Due to all technological developments it is already part of our present and future. A tax technical advice has to be implemented in systems, processes and controls. Instructions have to be given to people outside the tax function.  Alignment with the business is key for the tax function to plan in time and avoid future firefighting. That means that certain people excel in certain areas of tax and the outcome of the overall team effort will make the real difference from a quality standard perspective.

If teaming is part of a company’s business objective, the company’s “informal” culture or budget-based compensation targets can be the bottleneck to realize such teaming.

Is it good to have Stevie Wonder in the driver seat?

“A Ferrari is a beautiful, very fast and a state of the art car, but we should not put Stevie Wonder in the driver seat. He is an excellent song writer and performer but he never ever will be the next Michael Schumacher. It will be risky business if he controls the throttle” Richard Cornelisse

The above might be considered a ridiculous example, but strangely enough happens often in our daily practice. The downturn might even make it worse.

Why?

It is because of budget-based incentive targets. Everybody feels now the pressure and the focus is on making personal budget first. We might know the best driver, understand that he is the best option, but that does not mean we want Michael actually in the driver seat. It does not matter if Michael works for the same company or that it is in the best interest of the client. Stevie, wants to make his own comfort zone first. It is in his personal interest.

• Should we be surprised? 
• Is this not part of our human nature? 
• Is that not the reason why we have our company culture? 

Exactly, the reason why proactive management of common values is needed.

“In a profession that sells a promise of performance versus a tangible product or service, a firm’s vision, values, and culture lie at the heart of that promise. Vision is where the firm is headed. Values are the behaviors the firm holds important, and culture is the feel, the energy, the society within the organization. Collectively, they form the core around which the business is built.”  Maureen Broderick

Budget to actual exercises

Before I continue, I consider budget exercises still a necessity, especially for large organizations that need to manage the performance of a lot of people. The budget process provides top management some level of control.  Actual to budget exercises are and will remain an important part of people’s performance targets.

It is more about being aware of the pitfalls and its impact. After the budget is set, manipulation of the internal environment to make budget – at all costs – might results in disconnect and internal competition. Such behavior is in my view in conflict with the company’s business strategy such as growth, increase market share or market leadership.

One of the reasons could be that the personal performance -meeting budget-based incentive targets- is considered of a higher priority than the company’s own business objectives.  If this is something structural it becomes the company’s “informal” culture and result in:

1. power struggle over clients (protectionism, claiming clients and wins)
2. own “people first” attitude (no best team approach)
3. service offerings proposed that are actually outside the own area of expertise (no standard quality, increased liability, pricing variation)
4. lack of willingness to share relevant client related information (protectionism)

Budget-based compensation targets might also themselves create an incentive to underperform even in times of growth. Substantially exceeding budget could give discussions about how much the budget has been sandbagged last year with the result you getting higher targets next year. To avoid this, positive results might be carried forward to next year.

Jack Welch’s view

Jack Welch has his own view about budgeting.  He considers it number crunching and a waste of time that could be used in a more productive way. It is all about internal politics and time could be used better by focusing on the external environment: the customer.

What is the amount of time spent on budgeting?

The Beyond Budgeting Round Table, an industry research organization, estimates that the average corporation spends four months and 20-30% of senior executives’ and financial managers’ time on the budget.

“Making a budget is an exercise in minimization. You’re always getting the lowest out of people, because everyone is negotiating to get the lowest number”

” The budgeting process at most companies has to be the most ineffective practice in management. It sucks the energy, time, fun and big dreams out of an organization. It hides opportunity and stunts growth. In fact when companies win, in most cases it is despite their budgets, not because of them” Jack Welch

I like and admire Jack Welch and this kind of statements.

Budgeting a waste of time

Jack Welch’s complaint was that he was being sandbagged in the planning process itself.  Waste of productive time starts during setting the budget.  It is all about managing an internal conflict. The aim of the leadership is to get the budget as high as possible, the manager has an opposite strategy: “negotiation to the lowest”. That is the side effect of budget-based incentive targets.

Such a behavior – “passionately defending modest projections of mediocre performance” – conflicts with business objectives, when the company’s mission statement is to increase its market share and/or maintain or achieve market leadership. Is that not strange?

Jack Welch’s hope was not a better way to negotiate budgets, but an end to the negotiation. However, is it likely that managers propose themselves aggressive goals? If not, does the company’s culture have to change?

Assume that the company’s business plan was to grow with 15% overall and one of the business units exceeds and realizes 25% growth.  The budget is made. What does that say about the responsible manager? Did he do a good job? Should he earn a big bonus? That all depends. If you focus internally only a confirmative yes is the obvious answer. However, it could simply be underperforming when the growth is the cause effect of unexpected increase of demand in the market (external factors).  The same is applicable if competition shows much higher growth figures.

In an ideal world everybody knows how competition is performing, how the teams are set up and what the client portfolio is.  The own strength and weaknesses have been analyzed and measured ongoing. A gap analysis is made with competition and the gaps found can be prioritized and validated with top management. The impact of these gaps on the company’s overall business objectives are discussed. For the various solutions cost benefit analysis are made, so a constructive discussion with top management can be held about what is needed to close these gaps.

In the worse case the gap(s) will not be closed, but at least you have achieved mutual awareness and hopefully responsibility.

The above example is not only applicable for external advisers, but this method could be used by in-house (indirect) tax functions during their budget negotiation (about external spending) and/or getting extra resources.

The strength of this approach is that you look forward and focus on what still can be managed.  Budget to actual is a ‘look back’ exercise.

Maybe the best of two worlds is the winning combination.  Life is often about a good compromise.

How do you see this all?

Richard’s other Big4 publications

• How to Execute A Tax Strategic Plan And Be Successful
• About Market Leadership And Non Traditional Competitors
• Centralized Business Models And ‘Indirect Tax Automation’
• How To Manage The Perception Of C-level And Realize Tax Objectives
• Tax Controversy Strategy: ‘Proactively Managing The Changing Landscape’
• About ‘Business Integrity And ‘Being Inspired’
• The Indirect Tax Profession Is Evolving From An Individual To A Team Sport
• Would European Value Added Tax Work For The United States?
• US VAT Introduction Versus The Proposed Changes Of The ‘European Union’ VAT System

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 The Conflict Between ‘Actual To Budget’ Controls And ‘Budget-based Compensation Targets’ appeared first on Big4.com.

Is that enough?
The marketplace, of course, has cast its vote. The collapse of Andersen did not result in a flight to smaller firms, and it is likely that the loss of one of the remaining Big Four would have a similar result. This trend toward concentration merely has accelerated a trend that began as consolidation – featuring such monstrous mergers as Pricewaterhouse with Coopers Lybrand and Deloitte Haskins and Sells with Touche Ross.

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