Archive for the ‘Helpful Information’ Category
Thursday, April 5th, 2012
I’ve been reading off and on now for a couple of years about email dying/declining. I’m not yet convinced. However, my son rarely, if ever, emails his friends (or his mother) anymore. They (We) keep in touch via Twitter and Facebook. And, for the most part, he ignores telephone voicemail and tells me, “I never check voicemail anymore – email or tweet me.”
I do know that responding to e-mail is a REAL chore inside accounting firms. It’s almost become a badge of honor and a game of one-upmanship in partner meetings….. “I got 109 e-mails yesterday!” “That’s nothing, I got 215.” “Hey, I got that many this morning.”
As company e-mail volume explodes, more businesses are grappling with the data surge. Corporate e-mail storage is growing 20% to 25% a year according to recent research.
A recent article in TIME notes that Thierry Breton hates email. The French tech boss hasn’t used it since taking the helm at Europe’s largest IT firm, Atos, three years ago. And he’s instructed his 75000 employees to follow suit. “The deluge of information will be one of the most important problems a company will have to face,” Breton said upon announcing a “zero e-mail” policy last February that favors services more like Facebook and Twitter instead.
Also, according to the article, the data dump sucks $997 billion in productivity out of U.S. workers annually, according to research firm Basex. Much of the drag is due to bad habits. An estimated 30% of e-mail is “occupational spam” caused by overuse of cc, bcc and reply all.
There are software solutions out there than can help people communicate and collaborate inside your firm without sending one another twenty e-mails a day. Read my blog from April 5, 2011 to learn what Xcenric uses for team collaboration rather than e-mail. Read the TIME article to learn more about what large companies are doing.
Maybe the first step inside CPA firms is stopping the cc, bcc and reply all!
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Diamonds are forever. E-mail comes close.
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June Kronholz
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012
Did you receive your copy of my monthly newsletter in your inbox today?
If not, I hope you’ll visit my website to sign-up. If you did, be sure to take just a few minutes – yes, at this busy time – to read it. I try very hard to keep it sort and to the point.
This month’s articles are:
Accounting Profession Rebels (You know who you are.)
Observations on Complacency (You also know who you are.)
Upcoming Speaking Events (Have you registered yet for one or more of them?)
While we are on the READING topic, I hope you will read my article in March/April issue of the Tennessee CPA Journal:
The Social Transformation: Women’s Initiatives in Accounting Firms
I’ll be speaking at the inaugural Tennessee Society Women’s Career Summit on May 8th in Brentwood, TN. I hope to see you there.
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No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
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Chinese Proverb
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012
Working inside a CPA firm (or any other professional service organization for that matter), you might find yourself slowly developing “blinders” to what is going on in the exciting, changing and challenging business world outside of public accounting.
You love what you do and probably even love your clients and your firm. I hope you love your people! However, if you are passionate about growing, improving, expanding, polishing and branding your CPA firm, you might find yourself becoming much too narrowly focused.
Even social media makes it easier for accountants to sit behind their desk and avoid interacting face-to-face with people.
I continually urge you to become more creative. Don’t always follow the pack (which in the CPA world means the firms listed at the top of the MAP surveys).
First step, expand your reading list. Sure, read my blog (that’s #1!) but read blogs, magazines and books that are not focused on the CPA profession. Just try Googling a topic and embrace all the wonderful links that take you to some often eye-opening, mind-expanding reading.
Here’s an interesting blog post on FAST Company, titled: Desks, Where Creativity Goes To Die. Three recommendations from the blog post: 1) Leave the office. 2) Don’t specialize. 3) Stop reading business books.
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I'm not crazy, my mother had me tested.
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Sheldon Cooper
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
Growing, profitable and successful CPA firms hire young accounting graduates right out of college. I have often advised that it is usually best to “grow your own” future CPAs, client-service stars and potential owners. They don’t possess bad habits learned at other firms.
The down-side is you must teach, coach, guide and mentor these young people who are completely unfamiliar with the business world, with client accounting and tax and with putting others first (clients, of course but also the people they work with every day).
Naturally, you look for young people who are self-confident. You want those with high self-esteem. But, recent research tells us that too much high-self esteem definitely has a down-side.
The people who are currently firm owners (baby boomers and older Gen-X) were raised very differently from today’s crop of new accounting grads. When, as children, baby boomers had an outburst of high self-esteem, they were reminded by their parents, that they were acting “too big for your britches.”
As John Rosemond, a widely-read parenting expert writes:
People with high self-esteem want to be paid attention to and served. They believe in their entitlement. On the other hand, folks with high regard for others pay attention to others and look for opportunities to serve them.
It is unarguable that culture is best served, preserved, and advanced by folks who fit into the latter category. Entitlements weaken, and a culture-wide entitlement mentality weakens the entire culture. Along these lines, every single manager, employer, and supervisor with whom I’ve talked in the last decade or so has told me that today’s young college graduates, by and large, are not looking for work; rather, they are looking for benefits packages (i.e. entitlements).
I must admit, I have heard from many CPA firm partners that they have a baby-boomer partner who is definitely on the high self-esteem wagon, demanding attention and not caring about the feelings of others. Think about the future if ALL of your partners were without humility and a sense of caring for others.
Take a minute to read Rosemond’s article here. It might help you better mentor your young workforce.
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There is a difference between conceit and confidence. Conceit is bragging about yourself. Confidence means you believe you can get the job done.
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Johnny Unitas
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012
I was talking with Roy Keely of Xcentric last fall. He said, “I don’t even carry business cards anymore, with LinkedIn and other Internet tools, I can easily exchange contact information.”
I thought…. Roy is right-on, hardly anyone asks me for a business card anymore – they just want to know where to find me on the web (which is easy… just Google Rita Keller). Why bother with a business card?
An article appeared in many newspapers last week-end that validates this growing trend. Professionals are opting for LinkedIn and Bump as digital alternatives. Most of you are well aware of LinkedIn. If not follow the link to learn more about it. Bump is an app for your mobile device that enables you to simply “bump” hands while holding your mobile device and contact information is exchanges. Watch the cool video by following the link to Bump, above.
The article also notes:
- To Web-savvy people who are accustomed to connecting digitally, business cards are irrelevant, wasteful and just lame.
- If you have arranged to meet someone face-to-face, you have more than likely already connected via email, so there is really no need for a business card.
- U.S. sales of business cards have been falling since the late 1990s.
- Analysts say printed business cards, like newspapers, books and magazines, are fast giving way to digital alternatives.
- 85 million people have a professional network on LinkedIn and 77 million smartphone users have downloaded the Bump app.
- Paper is not so appealing to this generation, says the chair of psychology at Golden Gate University.
Real life reality check: Each year as I speak to CPAs across the country and chat with them during networking events, when I ask for a business card, the most common reply is, as they quickly check every pocket: “Oh, I don’t have any with me.”
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The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.
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Thomas Jefferson
Monday, March 19th, 2012
Yes, I must admit, keeping pace with all of the new technological advances, new devices, apps and numerous gadgets is quite a chore at times. But, don’t you just love all of the benefits technology brings to us now?
Last week while I was on vacation, I could tweet pictures on my private Twitter account so that my son and family could see the gigantic alligator we saw on a nature hike almost immediately. I also follow him and my daughter-in-law on twitter and really know and understand them better than I ever could before technology. I knew immediately how well my granddaughter was doing in the state spelling competition as soon as it happened even though I was unable to attend. I attempt to share lots of valuable information with accountants and their teams via my professional twitter – @cpamanagement. I hope you will follow me.
As for business, I get all my news, weather and current business news (including numerous tweets by CPAs and CPA profession consultants, vendors, etc.) via my iPhone or iPad. I stay in touch via Twitter and Facebook. Which brings me to the subject of today’s post. I became aware of an article in the Journal of Accountancy titled – The iPad Decision – because Tom Hood, CEO of the Maryland Society of CPAs put it on his Facebook page. (Thanks, Tom!)
You can’t possibly keep up with all of the reading that you need to do these days but you can enlist others to help you find the information you might need – - as I do via social media. Of course, LinkedIn is a great tool for CPAs, too.
If you are faced with The iPad Decision and wondering whether buying an iPad is what you should do – be sure to read the article in the Journal of Accountancy.
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Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
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Oscar Wilde
Friday, March 16th, 2012
It is amazing how dependent we are on technology, not only in our business life but also in our personal life. There are so many computers, phones, tablets and other gadgets helping us serve our clients and enjoy our lives.
In a CPA firm, the people responsible for keeping your firm’s technology on the leading-edge are SO important and key to the continual success of the firm. If you are NOT that person, I hope you will forward the link to this blog post to that person. They need a resource, a sounding-board and a support group and they can get it at the annual AAA Tech Fly-In.
Time to get registered. Every year the attendees rave about the quality of this conference and the valuable information they take back to their firms. Here’s the details:
Date: May 8-9, 2012
Location – Detroit Metro Airport Marriott in Romulus, Michigan
Here’s the agenda.
Speakers include:
- Ken Klika, Director, Networking Services, BCG Systems, Inc.
- Paul Abke, Network Administrator, Godfrey, Hammel, Danneels & Co.
- Christian James, Co-Founder, Xcentric
- John Higgins, CPA, CITP, Strategic Advisor, CPA Crossings
- Jim Fahey, COO, Apple Growth Partners
Register online.
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A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.
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Joseph Campbell
Thursday, March 15th, 2012
During 2011, as I traveled across the country talking with CPAs and their teams, I found it so interesting that many firms still do not conduct an annual planning retreat. Some say they used to do them, some say they do them every other year, some just have an expanded partner meeting and some tell me that they know they should have one but just never seem to get around to it.
Others do conduct annual planning retreats but they end up not being strategic – they talk about people, operations and what I call the day-to-day business of the firm that should not consume valuable partner time.
If you are a managing partner or firm administrator, this month’s issue of the Adamson Advisory newsletter offers some important, practical tips to help in the planning your annual retreat.
In addition to Adamson’s tips, here’s some things I want you to keep in mind:
- Your firm administrator should be carrying the heavy load of planning the retreat – helping with the agenda, doing all of the logistics and participating in the retreat.
- Keep everyone focused on the task at hand. At a retreat I facilitated last year, the MP went around with a small basket and collected all of the mobile devices (no lap reading at this session).
- Think big.
- Revisit your Purpose, Vision and Values – - do they still apply? Can you recite your own purpose? If not, it probably needs work.
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All our dreams can come true - if we have the courage to pursue them.
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Walt Disney
Monday, February 27th, 2012
Email overload seems to be an on-going challenge inside accounting firms. I continually hear from many of you working in the accounting profession, “I can’t keep up with my email!”
I am seeing more and more firms using codes in the subject line, such as RSVP (then the subject) – when they really need a reply, NNTR (then the subject) if there is No Need To Reply.
Here’s an interesting and enlightening infographic titled, Should I Send This Email?
I like the 3 tips for email near the bottom.
Created by: OnlineITDegree.net
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Men won't read any email from a woman that's over 200 words long.
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Doug Coupland
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012
According to a recent survey by CPA Trendlines, accounting firms are significantly increasing their business-building efforts.
66% of accountants say their firms have been increasing their marketing and business development activities in the last 12 months.
85% say they will be continuing to step up marketing in the coming 12 months.
55% are accelerating their own personal business development efforts.
83% listed adding new clients as their #1 concern, followed by – client retention, lead generation, and niche or specialty service.
Firms also plan to upgrade their websites and e-newsletters and displaying more thought leadership.
Great news! – - I hope you have a plan in place for your firm. If not, you better meet early (late April, early May) and get busy. Make your planning day very focused and come away with an action plan with steps that are owned by a specific person in the firm. Build in accountability.
You can purchase the complete 179-page survey from Bay Street Group.
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Timid salesmen have skinny kids.
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Zig Ziglar
