At this time of the year accountants are inundated with work from clients, the problem is, its all transactional compliance work and that makes everyone busy doing and no one is strategically positioning the practice for growth.
The problem is you’re stuck in the forest and not seeing the trees.
Let me explain.
Under a Premium Practice model, partners are freed up to actually pay attention to the clients real needs. Thus, year end compliance is an excellent opportunity to identify what a client needs help with, or the underlying issues clients are facing.
Farming for extra value add work, is what I called it. It’s about taking a holistic view of a client and using the annual tax meeting as an opportunity for growth.
Pink Sheets
The strategy works best with the pink sheet concept. The Pink Sheet is a dedicated form that lists all the issues within a clients compliance file.
Pink sheets cover:
- Administration matters – poor book keeping or lack of accounting system
- Tax planning opportunities
- Business profitability issues
- Business cash flow issues
- Wealth opportunities
- Family matters
- Estate and succession matters
- Legal issues
We had our team complete one on every client when preparing the annual accounts. You will be amazed at what shows up!
The pink sheet concept will actually provide you with too many opportunities to address in one meeting. NOTE: it’s important that you only discuss 1-3 significant ones at the year end meeting, keep the others for later in the year.
Under a Premium Practice model the pseudo partner would conduct the annual tax meeting while the strategy partner would be brought in to discuss the pink sheet matters (which of course position one of your Premium Offer packages).
If you’re not that advanced there is still plenty of opportunity here. You can try writing a management report for the client. The report allows clients to take your suggestions away with them and enables you to address the key matters in the report before you complete the annual work. Also, don’t forget to schedule in the extra work you pick up – just like its an annual compliance job. This ensures the work actually gets done.
By the way, the pink sheet strategy was what we used to underpin our transition to tripling our average fees.
