Who We Are

Practice Paradox™ was founded by Michael ‘MC’ Carter after he repeatedly noticed that the vast majority of accounting firms were not very good at communicating the value of what they do—and what they could do—for their clients.

MC noticed, on the other hand, that firms that are effective at marketing, communicating and selling, not only grow at faster rates and have higher fees per client, but that clients of such firms tend to be far more appreciative of and have much stronger relationships with their accountant.

As a Co-Founder of businessfitness™ in 2001, MC was a key analyst and author in the annual industry benchmarking report, The Good, the Bad & the Ugly® of the Accounting Profession. One of MC’s roles at businessfitness™ was to analyse the benchmarking data of the hundreds of accounting firms who completed the survey each year, identify the high performing firms, then interview the practitioners in these firms about what they do differently to other firms.

Based on many interviews and site visits, MC then wrote case studies for the Good Bad Ugly® reports on these accounting firms that covered all aspects of their practice management, from recruiting and induction processes, to team training to workflow management to pricing to write-off policies to client relationship management to marketing and ‘rainmaking’ approaches.

In his travels in dealing with hundreds of accounting firms around Australia, MC was consistently surprised by most firms’ lack of focus on and expertise in marketing and selling skills.

This confirmed for MC that it is a real ‘blind spot’ for the accounting profession.

This struck MC as a tremendous opportunity for the profession as he knows better than most the multiplying effect and ‘leverage’ that marketing can achieve for any business, having an impressive track record himself of tripling business’ revenues through the application of effective ‘leverage marketing’.

Occasionally—very occasionally—MC would come across an accounting firm that was great at marketing and communication with their clients.

These firms thrived.

But there was another thing that struck MC as curious.

In seminars and workshops by various consultants to accounting firms, MC noticed they would cover a broad range of topics including everything from pricing, write-off policies, team culture, systems, leadership, marketing and selling skills.

He was astounded by the superficial—virtually useless—treatment that industry consultants gave to the marketing and selling skills topics that were given, for example, a 1-hour slot in a full-day seminar, when what MC knows is needed in order to bridge this skill gap is in-depth, systematic and ongoing training and development.

This combination of observing an obvious skills gap in the accounting profession and therefore a very clear market need, combined with the realisation that no industry consultants were focused solely on this crucial high value skills area inspired MC to start writing the book, The Practice Paradox™ - Why Most Accounting Firm Don’t Help Their Clients More.

This then led to the formation of the training, publishing and consulting organisation, Practice Paradox™.