Capacity To DO More Marketing | How Knowledge Capture Technologies Can Free Up Capacity In Your Accounting Firm

Michael Carter - Tuesday, February 07, 2012 - Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

Before you can get really active with marketing your accounting or advisory firm, you need spare capacity.

At our last Marketing Masterclass I asked the accountants and advisors in the room which topics they’d like covered in future Masterclasses. Chris B., a principal in a regional firm asked, “MC, we love all these marketing and social media strategies, but seeing as you’re up with the latest in technology, can you show us ways we can free up time in managing our practices so we can actually DO more marketing?”

In my head these thoughts quickly ticked over: “Creating capacity is a topic upstream of marketing (our core focus at Paradox), but if practitioners want help it his area and it will flow through to help them do more marketing, then I’m open to it.”

I put it to the room, “If I showed you all how to use the latest technologies for documenting, streamlining and automating processes in your firm, so you could free up capacity and delegate and out-source more, who’d be interested in that?”

Whoosh. A sea of hands went straight up.

“What specifically do you mean by latest technologies, MC?” came the next question.

I explained that the days of ‘procedures’ as a way of codifying your business' processes and for inducting and training staff are over. Using Microsoft Word documents (or even text-based wiki pages), for example, to describe processes with a series of numbered paragraphs is very out-dated thinking.

It is ‘last century thinking’, in my opinion.

Think about it.

If you were with a team member at their desk and they asked you how to do something in your practice management, workflow, accounting or tax software, you wouldn’t just hand them a text-based document (a.k.a. “a sea of text”) and say, “Here. Read this. That explains it.”

No. Of course not.

You’d SHOW them on screen. If you had the time.

The team member could then SEE how to do it. Not just read about it and then try to imagine it.

Ideally, you’d also then ask the team member to do the task themselves, to check they understood how to do it.

If you had the time.

But you don’t often have the time, do you?

Especially not over and over again, to explain the same thing, repeatedly, with various team members.

So what’s the alternative?

Knowledge capture.

Knowledge re-use.

In a visual, multimedia way. Using the latest tools.

We live in exciting times. There are now inexpensive software tools for not only creating videos (called ‘screencasts’) of what’s happening on a computer screen along with audio of the trainer’s voice explaining what they are doing, but recently we’ve discovered an even more powerful software for creating ‘visual procedures’.

In many ways these visual procedures are more useful than screencasts. But they work hand in hand with them in an overall methodology we have developed.

What’s brilliant is that not only are these visual procedures incredibly effective as communication and training tools, they are lightning fast to create.

I’ve consulted in business systemisation and creating ‘operations manuals’ and later the on-screen equivalent in intranets since the mid-1990s.

I love business systems because they are a hallmark of all great businesses.

They are, in effect, a pre-requisite for business success.

Thirough business systems documentation is also a pre-requisite for franchising or successful growth and expansion in any business model.

So not only does great business process documentation make your business easier to manage and to grow, but it becomes an intellectual property (IP) asset on your balance sheet.

Yet most business owners flounder when it comes to documenting their processes.

Or, even if they do succeed in getting their core processes documented and up-to-date after a concerted push, they struggle with the never-ending maintenance of keeping the processes up to date as things inside and outside of the business change.

And so their systems gradually date and become less useful each month.

Why does this happen to business systems?

Traditional approaches, frankly, are just TOO DAMN HARD AND TOO DAMN SLOW.

If they were easy and fast, then businesses by and large would have their systems documentation up to date.

But it’s not just about process DOCUMENTATION.

Where possible, it’s also about process AUTOMATION.

Over the past decade I have developed a hierarchy of correct thinking regarding streamlining, documenting and automating your business' processes.

Of the 13 steps in the methodology, the first is Discriminate, followed by Eliminate, then Automate.

Interestingly, the ‘Delegate’ step (delegation being a perennial challenge for many practitioners and managers) is not until step 10.

Note that: Step 10

With great systems in place, it is less necessary to be highly skilled at delegation. (Go on. Breathe a sigh of relief.)

The Discriminate step is about evaluating each step in a process to see if it actually adds any value to the client, or are done simply because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”.

Then, the no-value or low-value steps are eliminated from the process.

After all, there’s no point documenting unnecessary steps!

The next step is to see what can be automated. What can be done by technology. What can be done in a ZERO labour way?

You know, one of the great things I love about the world we live in, is that if you can ask a question, there IS an answer. The most important thing isn’t finding an answer. Answers are usually easy. The key is to be consistently asking the right QUESTIONS. Asking BETTER questions.

So, if you keep asking yourself and your colleagues, “Which processes can we automate in the business?”, do you know what will happen? You’ll start to see opportunities to do that. You’ll start to discover tools that make that automation possible.

And you’ll meet people who can teach you the overall methodology and best approach for using these tools.

And that’s where our next Masterclass can play a role …

We’ll announce more about the event later this week.

For now, pencil in the dates April 27 and 28 for this Innovation Masterclass. The location is Twin Waters on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast north of Brisbane. If you can’t attend in person, we’ll also be making available Live Video Streaming tickets where you can watch and participate live over the internet.

More to be unveiled soon …