Articles by thriveal

Have you blown anything up lately?  Like your phone system, or your tax season process, or some new software you had to install?  Owners of CPA firms are risk averse business owners.  I think we often seek to avoid pain, rather than trying new things.  Because if you try enough new things, you will blow stuff up.  There is no way around it.  Avoiding risk and pain is really normal but if you want to change yourself, your firm and our profession, then you will have to go blow some stuff up.

A story: we got rid of our phone system a while back and started using our cell phones instead.  We just let an online PBX system route calls to our cell phones.  Sounds cool, but it didn’t work exactly right.  We are on Verizon and we found out later that Verizon doesn’t let us transfer calls between our team’s iPhones.  Not cool.  So if someone calls and we need to transfer the phone call, we have to tell them to call back.  Totally not cool.  That has made some people upset, understandably.

But I’m not going to stop blowing stuff up.  I won’t do it on purpose, but I will blow stuff up if it means growing my firm in the way that I feel is best for our firm, our team and our customers.  What have you blown up lately?

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I was talking with a banker friend the other day about how his bank manages people using analytics.  They produce lists of lenders periodically ranking everyone in the bank… from top to bottom.

I remember being judged by a number.  Realization rates mean everything in CPA firms.  I knew it was time to disrupt our profession.  And I remember our purposes being to make money.  Everything was centered around the bottom line.  And when the bottom line is first, customers and your staff (now called team) are second.

I challenged my banker friend not to judge his team by their “report” but to give them ultimate freedoms and then let them shine.  But the bank says no to that.  The bank has goals – and that is to make money, and they believe they can manage that growth by judging people with sterile reports.

So I told him to start a new bank, where profit is not the goal.  Huh?  Profits are a result of great businesses.  They don’t have to be your mission statement.

CPA firms need to be disrupted where profit is not part of our mission statement, but simply a result of being a great firm.  Banks need to be disrupted too.  Higher education needs to be disrupted.  Governments need to be disrupted.

Maybe your profession needs to be disrupted.  What will you disrupt in 2012?

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