One of the challenges in accountancy firms is the distance between the people with the information and the people with the power.
This slows everything down and puts a significant burden on the owner or partners within the firm (OPTION A). But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Take pricing, for example. Who prices in your firm? Who then re-prices clients as the scope of work and their demands change? Is it you? Is it your team?
Usually, this is the owner/partner who then becomes the bottleneck in the process. This leads to scope creep and more significant pressure on the team.
Is it that the team does not WANT to re-price clients, or does the owner not WANT to let go of doing this? If the team DID re-price, what’s the WORST thing that could happen? What’s the BEST thing? What are you waiting for?
Let’s take it a step further. What about changing the actual pricing in the system? Who does that? The owner/partner or the team? Why?
Wouldn’t it make more sense for the bookkeeper to be tweaking the bookkeeping pricing and the payroll clerk to be tweaking the payroll pricing? Surely they’re the ones with the information and who knows where the leaks are.
What if everyone within the system had the power to evolve the system and rather than seek the owner’s permission to make changes, they presented the finding of running pricing experiments with clients (OPTION B.)
This would indeed be brave new work, but imagine if everyone in your firm was empowered to drive the business forward towards a common goal. How would it feel if you were no longer the bottleneck? Scary? Exciting? Liberating?
We were once the same. So we decided to flip it. We got the team having conversations with our clients.
I know what you’re thinking…
“My staff won’t want to / can’t really do that, they’re already maxed out with what they do. I don’t want them to get it wrong. I’m definitely the best person to be doing this.”
Empower them. Give them the system and the technology to do it. What is the worst that can happen?
