Practice Paradox

Accounting firms’ challenge of selling additional services

// August 2nd, 2009 // The Practice Paradox

Over the past 18 years I have worked in and around professional service firms, including industrial design firms, business and marketing consultancies, a medical device research and development start-up, a business software development consultancy, and accounting  firms. Each of these businesses has had one thing in common: ’selling the intangible’; they are ‘knowledge firms’ employing, as Peter Drucker coined it many years ago, ‘knowledge workers’ who create, develop and use intellectual property (IP) to create value for clients.

Knowledge-based businesses are faced with a unique set of challenges including (among many others) finding and retaining talent, building knowledge management systems, and persuading clients to invest in ‘the invisible’; that is, services that  are intangible and therefore impossible to evaluate in advance of experiencing them.

Out of all these businesses, however, one type in particular struggles with selling the value of what they do—or rather, what they could do—for clients, and that is accounting firms.

How have I come to notice this?

In 2001 I co-founded businessfitness™, a firm that specialises in improving the performance of accounting firms. Each year we’d conduct an exhaustive benchmarking study of the accounting profession in Australia and publish a report called The Good, the Bad & the Ugly® of the Accounting Profession. We’d survey hundreds of firms, analyse the data, identify the high-performing firms, interview them about the way they lead, structure and manage their businesses, then write about these ‘best practices’. I was fortunate enough to be intimately involved in this process and I had the privilege of interviewing and spending time with many practitioners from high performing progressive firms around Australia.

In the process I learnt a lot.

Over the 8 years from 2001 to 2009 I encountered hundreds of accounting firms in my work with businessfitness. This built on my prior experience working with the accounting industry when back in the mid-1990’s where I was with The Results Corporation when we ran the very first Accountants Boot Camp, and later with Paul Dunn-led spin-off company Results Accountants Systems where I was in charge of Systems Research & Development (that is, developing and ‘productising’ the firm’s intellectual property).

15 years on, I see that many accounting firms are still coming to grips with the challenge of providing higher value optional services to their clients.

So what is holding firms back?

It’s a combination of lacking the right psychology, the right skills and the right systems for ’selling the intangible’ to clients.

Not until a firm can sell additional value, can they add additional value to clients.

This blog, my books, our webinars and consulting services will teach accounting firm practitioners and staff how to do just that.

I look forward to sharing this journey with you …