Why you should run your accountancy firm like a business

The thing is, most accountants don’t have a business, they have chaos.

And whenever you have chaos, you’re unable to spend time on what’s important and you’ll be forever dragged into what’s not.

You have clients taking up all of your time and energy, who don’t pay you enough, want more and more from you and don’t seem to value what you do, despite your best efforts.

You’re constantly helping your team with the challenges they face, and everyone seems to have a different way of doing things, despite your attempts to systemise and bring in technology to get everyone working consistently.

And you’re ultimately not getting the rewards from the hard work that you do, which include financial rewards, the gift of time, growth, joy and fulfilment, which is unfair and not why you started this.

You started in this industry because you wanted to impact your client’s businesses and help them grow profitably and sustainably.

You wanted to use your skills and your innate abilities to serve others and to bring certainty and success into their lives.

But all of a sudden you find yourself running a business, leading a team and dealing with challenges you were never told about.

And then the game changed on you. 

Cloud accounting came along which has simplified many things, but the software company’s adverts imply that everything is now just a ‘click of a button’. So, the work that you were doing, that was once highly valued by your clients, became less so, because they think they can now do it themselves.

But the service you provide is still complicated. 

Your clients are still complex.

The nature of what you do still carries great risk.

So, while every other firm seems to be talking about all the great things they’re doing, you still feel stuck, juggling clients, managing your team, working harder than ever and getting very little reward.

You feel frustrated and overwhelmed and wonder why every other firm seems to be smashing it out of the park.

Well, let me tell you… they’re not; well at least not as many as would have you believe. But there are some firms who are.

Some firms have got their clients doing what they want them to do, in the way they want it doing, when they want it done.

These clients are paying two times, three times and even ten times more than they were before, AND they value the firm that serves them more than ever.

They have their staff all operating watertight systems in the way they should be run, consistently, whilst providing incredible value and experiences for their clients. 

The owners of these firms feel more in control and are enjoying increased energy, more time and more money, so they can do more of what they love with the people they love. 

I know that this is happening because I’m the Director of an accountancy firm myself, where I see it happening day in and day out. It’s not that we’re perfect by any means; perfect firms don’t exist. We’re work in progress. But we’re proud of the many things that we do have right, which we willingly share, and these learnings and insights are now impacting thousands of other firms around the world.

But when you’re in the thick of it yourself and you feel overwhelmed, it seems like there are 10,000 things to fix, it feels like you’ll never solve them all and it’s difficult to even know where to start.

As you try and solve one problem over here, another one erupts behind you, so you find yourself going round and round in circles.

This is because most of the problems people attempt to solve are surface problems. These surface problems are only symptoms of something much deeper; much more fundamental.

To solve the real problem, we have to go into the core of your business and fix the ONE problem that will make most of the 10,000 either disappear completely or become less relevant.

Check out The Gap’s top 10 ways that accountants can start thinking more like a business owner here.