This one’s going to be short and sweet…
I’m a big believer in the concept of practicing what you preach.
It’s why I made the decision to acquire my own accountancy practice 11 months ago, to practice what I preach and prove to my clients that everything I say is possible.
Eleanor Roosevelt famously said, “it’s not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself”.
And as accountants, we often ask a lot of our clients…
- You should be setting goals
- You should be looking to reduce your costs and improve your profitability
- You should be increasing your prices
- You should be benchmarking your financials against others in the industry
- You should be improving your work/life balance
…and yet how many accountancy practices are practicing what they preach and doing this in their own practices?
I’ll let you figure out the answer to that one.
But the point is that if you’re to fulfil this position of ‘trusted advisor’ then you need to be good at what you do, worth the fees that you charge but most importantly run your own business successfully.
And running your own business successfully means that…
- You have short and long-term goals for your practice
- Your profitability is around the 40% mark
- You’re charging what your worth
- You have a systemised customer service strategy
- You’re not working silly hours every week to keep the doors open
- You actually have a great life that you’re enjoying
…and loads more things.
But why aren’t more accountancy practices doing this?
The reason comes back to the old accountant vs. business owner debate.
While ever you’re thinking like an accountant – you’re focused on accounts and tax etc.
But once you start thinking like a business owner, that’s when you can focus on all of the other things.
I think this quote from one of my clients recently sums it up quite nicely:
“We’re all good at what we do, but we may not necessarily be experts at running a business”.
And this is true.
You trained as accountants, not business owners.
You never learnt marketing, or sales, or managing a team, or systemisation.
And to some extent, you can’t learn this stuff. You have to earn these stripes by actually doing it. And that’s only possible once you make the mental jump from being an accountant to being a business owner.
Because once you make that jump, you can fulfil the position of the ‘trusted advisor’, practice what you preach, and make yours and your clients’ businesses much more successful.