These strategies are proven to work for any CPA, whether they are just starting their practice, an established practitioner looking to reach new heights of success, or are working as a partner or professional in a larger firm.

Salim says “When I see CPA firms struggling, they’ve simply become another commodity just like the rest of the competitors. They haven’t positioned themselves as different and unique.”

There are 3 common mistakes CPAs make when it comes to positioning themselves and their firms:

• Trying to be all things. Most practitioners hesitate to specialize in one area because they are scared to close off other options. But no one can be an expert at everything. The secret is to find an area that is broad enough to appeal to a wide range of people and which keeps open the opportunity to work with them to meet their other needs.
• Waiting for permission. Some CPAs are too shy or modest to position themselves as an expert. It’s almost like they are waiting for someone to tell them it’s okay. They don’t realize the value they can and do provide through their knowledge.
• Not focusing on the audience. It’s tempting for a professional to get bogged down in the technical details. However, to build a personal brand, one must think about their clients and their problems. People are interested in solutions to problems, not the technical steps.

Salim Omar is an accountant with a passion for helping other small business owners and CPAs succeed. In addition to helping his clients build profitable businesses, he is committed to teaching other CPAs how to attract more clients and increase their income, while enjoying their lives more.

His articles have been published nationwide in prestigious industry publications such as Accounting Today, The CPA Journal, and Financial Advisor. Contact Salim Omar for an interview by calling 732-566-3660. More information on Salim’s new book: “The Ultimate CPA Practice in the New Economy” can be viewed at www.CPAmarketingGenius.com.

One of my mentors for the past 15 years has been Stephen Covey, author of the bestselling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His ideas were instrumental in helping me turn my practice from struggling to highly successful.

One of the seven habits that Stephen identifies is “To Begin with the End in Mind.” What he means by this is that being able to create a clear picture of where you want to go will help you get there much faster and more easily.

It’s rather like embarking on any journey to an unfamiliar destination.

Imagine you were driving to Alaska for the first time. Without a map or clear directions, you’d end up taking many wrong turns or driving in circles for hours and perhaps not even getting there at all.

It may seem a fairly obvious error. But that’s the way many CPAs attempt to run their practices or their careers. They have no clear picture of their desired destination and no map of how they plan to get there.

The end results can be the same – a great deal of wasted time and even failing to get where they want to go.

A Strategic Objective can serve as a clear picture of your desired destination and can be your road map for getting there.

A Strategic Objective is a one-page document that describes your practice at its best and addresses the following big questions:

• This is who we are.
• This is how we operate.
• This is who we serve.
• This is our competitive advantage.

To create your Strategic Objective, you need to sit down and develop a clear vision of where you want to go with your practice. Envision in your mind exactly what it will be like at some stage in the future – perhaps three, five, or ten years down the road.

Creating the first draft will take you a few hours and then you’ll spend a bit of time over the next few days refining it.

Here are some crucial questions that will help you develop your Strategic Objective:

• What is the big picture for your practice? Think of your practice
as a product and specify what the end product will look like in the future.

• Who are your employees? How many? Describe them.

• What will your gross billing be? $200,000; $500,000; $1 million;
or several million dollars?

• What services will you provide?

• What types of clients will you be attracting? Geographic areas?
Industries?

• What is your Unique Service Proposition (USP) ? What makes
you different from the competition? What is your reason for
existence?

• How many days/hours will you work each week (during tax
season , in the off -season)?

• What is the legacy you will leave behind?

As soon as you have a clear Strategic Objective for what you want your practice to look like in the future, you will be much closer to making it a reality.

Warmly,

Salim

I have observed that a large percentage of CPA firms purchase a website from a service provider that sells generic website templates that simply don’t work in the real world. You want to advertise you are unique in your field, don’t you? But if your site is nothing but unique and looks cheap to boot – you will turn prospects away. Distance yourself from the crowd and be different from your competitors.

Here are the most common mistakes I see CPAs make with their website:

Too Much Information
Your website should not be like a brochure with technical information written in small letters. How many people really read those? Same goes for you site. It has to be built with the client in mind, as if the client is sitting in front of you and you are telling him/her about your practice. Cluttering your site with a lot of information will only tell them you have an information dump.

How Are You Different?
That is something you should pay attention to. Why will the prospect be better off with your firm instead of others? Your website needs to accentuate your strengths and uniqueness, not copy what your competitors have done.

You Talk Too Much About You
Too much “we” and you lose people because you talk about yourself too much. That is why people go to websites – to see how they can be helped. Talk about how your service can make their lives easier or faster and better.

Your Site Hasn’t Been Updated
You have to show that there are people behind your site, not just electronics. You can do that by updating your site and making it current. Your site needs to reflect the industry’s standards and be up to date on new technology and information.

There is No ‘About You’ Page
This is very important. People who are looking to hire a new CPA firm want to know that there are real people behind it. You have to establish a sense of trust, and you can do it in the ‘About You’ page. Make that page as personal as you can, never generic.

No Endorsements
One of the most important things is people’s endorsements. Anyone can say his/her firm is the best in the world, but can you prove it with clients’ feedbacks? Prospects want to know what other people went through as they consider to hire you.

There is No Real Address
People want to do business with other people, not with logos. Not having a physical address on you site feels like it is a company that can disappear overnight. Street address, phone number, e mail address and even a Google Map embedded in your site with driving directions, will tell your prospects you are not afraid to look them in the eye.

It’s Hard to Navigate
People’s attention span is pretty short these days. If the navigation on your site is not intuitive and easy to follow, you will lose prospects that are frustrated with the process.

These are the most obvious trust breakers that drive people away from websites without the practitioner realizing what they are doing wrong. Make sure you are not guilty of any of them. More information on how you can create a killer website can be found here: www.CPAmarketingGenius.com

You leave with nothing on paper and when you get home to talk to your spouse, you realize you can’t remember exactly what you were told. Despite all this, the diagnoses always seem to be right, and the treatments work. Maybe you’ve stayed on as the patient of a doctor like this and maybe you haven’t, but you can be sure that most people would change their providers if they had the option.

You don’t want your practice to be the CPA version of Dr. Richards. You can be sure, though, that Dr. Richards thinks he’s doing what he needs to do, because he’s giving you good health care. The problem is, he’s not thinking about the patient’s experience from the patient’s point of view.

Have you thought about your clients’ experience from the client’s point of view?

Here’s a quick exercise to help you get started. Choose any one of your clients (or if you’re new in practice and don’t have a client yet, imagine what you expect the experience of your first client will be like). Think about the various contacts that client has had with you since becoming your client.

• How did the client learn about your service?
• When and where have they met with you?
• What modes of communication do you use to contact them, and how often?
• How many of the clients’ encounters with you are likely to have felt positive?
• How many probably felt negative? Why?

Now make a list of qualities you imagine your clients are likely to desire in their experience with your firm. Again, if you have employees, you might want to ask them to do the same exercise and see if their lists are similar to yours.

Going through this exercise will help you ensure your clients’ experiences at your CPA office are NOT like those at Dr. Richards office.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

In this blog post, I want to convey a very important idea. It is for you to get used to the idea that it’s your job to keep in touch with your clients, rather than waiting for them to call when they need services or advice.

I’ll ask you to think about this from a client’s point of view. A friend of mine recently hired a local mover to help her with an in-town move. Before the date on which the move was scheduled to occur, the mover phoned twice to make sure everything was still on schedule and to ask whether there was anything additional that she might need help with. After the move was completed, the mover sent my friend a hand-written note, thanking her for her business and wishing her well in her new job (which he remembered from his discussion with her). My friend has strongly recommended this mover to everyone since then, and the communication was a large part of what made her feel so positive about him.

What professionals have you worked with who kept in touch with you and made an impression?

What was it about that communication that made it special?

Make some notes for your own future reference, especially of any contact ideas that you think might work with your own clients.

In my accounting practice, we have created a touch plan that consists of 60 – to 70 touches per year, above and beyond the time when we service the client. The results are a high retention rate and a ton of referrals.

Share with the CPA community the number of touches you have in your CPA practice.

Testimonials are a must have. If you don’t have clients, meaning you are just starting out, then get them from freebie clients who you’ve helped.

The key thing to focus on when asking for a referral is for it to be specific and for it to have provided tangible results. It could be something like: “I had this problem, then I started working with you and now my situation looks like…..”

You can also design a handout asking for tangible results since your time together. Use the worksheet I have provided. It will give you an exact set of questions to ask. This is a really efficient way to do it. You may hand this to your clients towards the end of a project.

Here’s what’s important.

The mental shift from “doer of the task” (doing accounting work, preparing tax returns, performing the analysis, etc.) to “promoter of your practice” (marketing your services) is vital if you plan on taking your practice to the next level.

I would say that over 99% of CPA practitioners do not make this mental jump from “I provide accounting services for a living” to “I market my CPA practice for a living.”

The CPA practitioner “doer” sees his or her role of providing their accounting/tax services as their primary role. The “marketing minded” CPA practitioner sees acquiring clients, retaining them and maximizing their total client value as their primary role.

Once I realized this, I started paying more attention to it and I began to see significant changes.

Send me your comments.

I’m a big believer in the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle. What the 80/20 rule says as it pertains to the CPA practice is that 80% of the money is made by only 20% of the CPAs; and of course, 20% of CPA practitioners are making 80% of the money.

This is important to be aware of because it means that if 10 CPA practice owners are asked how business is going, 8 of them will say “Man, it’s a hard business. I can’t make any money in this market; all the clients care about is low fees and it’s impossible to get good staff.” And those eight out of 10 practitioners will form the average person’s opinion how the accounting and tax business is going.

But the reality is that 2 out of the 10 CPA practitioners are making all the money, and they are doing so because they have a reliable CPA practice marketing system. They’re not just relying on word of mouth or attending chamber events to hand out their business cards, cold calling, etc.

They are proactively marketing, and as result of that marketing, they’re working less, but making more, because their clients behave the way clients should behave. Their clients, gained through their marketing, are attracted to them, not repulsed. The clients are not asking them to cut their fees. They are not threatening to take their business to their competitors.

I have observed that CPA practitioners usually emulate the habits and tactics of the unsuccessful practitioner, not of the successful one. They do this because they focus upon the majority…..the 8 out of the 10 practitioners that they see doing things “the way everyone else in this industry does them.” They never take the time to understand how the successful CPA practitioner became successful.

Maybe it’s hard to pick the successful ones out of the crowd. By the way, by successful, I don’t mean working 60-80 hour weeks during tax season and getting burnt out. If you are working that number of hours per week and making $150k or $200k per year, that to me is not successful. Your family will certainly not think of that successful.

I look forward to your comments.