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04/14/2013

The Customer is Always Right, Unless You are Serving the Wrong Customer

Many of us are wrapping up a tough tax season and right now I bet you can name a handful of wonderful clients. And possibly some you would rather refer elsewhere.

Right now, while it’s fresh on your mind, think through these questions with specific customers in mind. I’ll be using two of our customers (names changed) as an example, Bob and Jane.

Did your customer fight your process?

Bob seemed to find our processes easy. He had no trouble paying online before the work was done. He was happy to know the price before the work was done. He did not struggle with reviewing his tax return online, using our online portals to deliver documents, or signing his agreement online. In fact, after I emailed him to let him know his returns had been accepted, he replied with a “You guys rock!” email. Read more

Category:: Innovation, Management and Operations, Taxes
Comments:: 13

04/01/2013

Putting the “Team” in “Teamwork”

The omniscient manager.

You know: the mastermind, who has the vision, and orchestrates all the pieces in a three-dimensional chessboard, to achieve a magnificent result. They are filled with sage wisdom, far-seeing insight, and a gut instinct that never errs. We watch with awe and aspire to one day be that person.

Might I humbly submit…they don’t exist. Or at least they are as rare as unicorns.

So why are our business structures built on this myth? Why do we have managers, or at least, why are they endowed with powers and expectations that far outstrip a realistic understanding of what they can accomplish? Is it helping, or hurting, to follow this accepted “professional” model?

But what would a world look like without managers anyways? Read more

Category:: Leadership, Management and Operations
Comments:: 5

02/11/2013

Great Negotiators Aren’t All Soulless Monsters. Some Are Heartless Bastards.

Everyone wishes they had better negotiation skills. Sort of. We want to be amazing negotiators, but we don’t want to be sleazy A-holes, and it’s hard to be the former without (intentionally or unintentionally) becoming the latter. Regardless, it’s fun to watch people with questionable morals use their Jedi mind tricks to con people out of money (and maybe we can learn something along the way).

Consider the following sleazy A-holes¹.

Read more

Category:: Management and Operations
Comments:: 1

11/18/2012

The Why, How, and Who of Building a Great Team

We talk a lot in Thriveal about leaving your current job to go out on your own and start your own firm. That is an exciting and scary time in the life of a business owner to be sure. It is also very exciting to watch that business grow and to build your team. It has taken ten years to get the team we currently have in place at our firm, and they are simply amazing.

Why Build A Team

As always, let’s start with why. Does every business owner need to build a team or is it perfectly fine to be a solopreneur? It probably depends, but here are some reasons that we have chosen to build our team. Maybe some of the following reasons will apply to your business.

Category:: Leadership, Management and Operations
Comments:: 3

11/12/2012

Take Off the ROWEz-Colored Glasses

So it’s been a few weeks since we had the THRIVEal “Deeper Weekend” learning gathering. I wanted it to be called “THRIVErdome, Battle Royale of Best Practices: That which does not kill you makes you less stupid.” But that got shot down (Jody Padar said it didn’t sound aggressive enough*).

We spent all day Thursday (which is apparently considered part of “the weekend” to Jason Blumer) with Jody Thompson, co-author of the book Why Work Sucks and How To Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution. She guided us through the concept of a results- only work environment, or “ROWE,” and everybody came away from our time with her with a raging ROWEner.

Category:: conferences, Management and Operations, ROWE, THRIVEcast
Comments:: 2

07/27/2012

Don’t Compete, Innovate (with the Work Innovation Grid)!

My homeboy Joey Brannon, CPA just wrote an awesome post on his blog recently. He talked about making sure you don’t compete with your clients. I didn’t realize the focus of the post until I read further. In summary, if you are still doing work that your customers can do, then you are basically competing with them (or you will be competing with them soon). His example was a CPA that prepares individual tax returns vs. a client who can prepare their own taxes on Turbo Tax. If you keep trying to grow your practice filling out individual tax returns, then you are basically going to be competing with your clients that can prepare their own tax returns.

Category:: CPA firm, Management and Operations
Comments:: 3

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