With any Accountancy Practice, the hardest thing to deal with is managing the traffic that comes from your clients. Traffic is made up of “Communication traffic” and “Production traffic”.
If you are not coping with the traffic that is generated under normal circumstances, then an event such as a pandemic, your Practice will be pushed over the edge.
The damage is two-fold:
- The first is the inability to have the time to service your client and not being available to them in their time of need
- The second is working enormous hours and not getting remunerated for it
The solution is to run your Practice like a business and managing the traffic flow needs to be broken into two sections namely:
- Production team and
- Communication and Sales teams
These teams need to be set up where some people simply handle the “production and completing the work” and other people handle the “Communication and the Sales process”
The “Communication and Sales process” is broken down further into 3 stages:
- “Discovery session” where the Accountant spends a few minutes identifying the clients’ problems and coming up with a solution which can also be assisted with by having a “Menu of Services” then progressing a quick as possible to the next stage called a “Proposal”
- “Proposal” is then developed and sent to the client for acceptance. No work should begin unless the proposal is accepted to act as a “cooling-off period” to avoid situations where you have committed the time to the task but the client was not serious about going ahead and refuses to pay you for it and you are in that awkward situation where if you insist on payment, you will lose the client or you write the invoice off as a bad debt. Either way, it’s a poor outcome. At best it would have damaged the relationship with the client.
- “Production” is when the proposal is accepted, then its sent to the “Production Team” whose job is to complete the “Orders” that have been accepted (acceptance of the proposal has meant the “Cooling-off period” has passed ) and this minimizes/avoids the awkward hours spent trying to collect payment or negotiate an outcome that does not damage the relationship with the client.
The idea is to move as quickly as possible from the “Discovery session” to the “Proposal section” to minimize the time spent talking to clients that cannot be charged for because often Accountants do not understand the “sales process” and spend too much time in the
“Discovery session” giving away all their knowledge and not recognizing the “sales signals” which includes a “Proposal to be sent” in order to “Monetize their knowledge” instead of giving it all away for free and complaining later that they work long hours and not get remunerated for their time
If firms implemented the above Processes than they will monetize the long hours and be available to their clients and get paid fairly for their time
The pandemic simply highlighted a weakness in the business that needed fixing.
1. Grab a free copy of our book – Accountants 20-Hour Workweek
4. Work with the Wize Guys privately
If you’d like to work directly with the Wize Mentor team to take you from stuck to scale…just send us a message with the word “Growth”… tell us a little about your firm and what you’d like help with, and we’ll get you all the details! – Click Here