beBetter 

In my previous blog, we talked about “the gap” and our need for a wake-up call regarding moving to an advisory services mindset. 

So how do we move our organizations towards advisory services? How do we seize our future by being relevant starting now? I think there are four foundational building blocks, and we’ll discuss the first one today: MINDSET SHIFT.

We see it every day—automation, implemented well, reduces the amount of compliance work we perform.

We experience it every day—fierce competition from outside our profession pursuing our clients. 

We feel it every day—the market for professional services is demanding and opening the door for "higher value services."

In my last blog, we related my personal story of changing hair stylists to the process that clients are actually using to find relevant advisors today. They are leaving existing relationships by pulling in information from advisors that are speaking to their needs. Our profession is at an intersection where many of our historical services are less valued and being commoditized due to our lack of differentiation. In fact, more and more firms are competing on price rather than value. The decreased margins across the profession speak to this loud and clear. 

For some reason, hair has been a central theme for me lately. Maybe because I’m quickly losing mine. I have a lot more forehead today than five years ago. Thank goodness I still have the perfect face for radio! 

Most of us are extremely picky about who cuts our hair. I certainly am. I have a “cowlick” and when it’s cut too short, it sticks up everywhere. For most of us, changing hair stylists is like changing your tax advisor, wealth advisor or auditor—it only happens when we feel like we must make a move. 

I frantically looked for the hair dryer as I was already 15 minutes late to meet our team to prepare for an important presentation that morning. As I turned the place upside down, I thought—I know this nice resort provides a hair dryer in every room. Now it only takes me about 60 seconds to “style” my hair, but it does better when blow-dried.

After looking in all of the usual places in the bathroom, I continued my search in the closet and then to the rest of the room. Having exhausted all known possibilities, I picked up the phone and hit the button for housekeeping.

Google has a very large grocery bill. That’s just one thing I learned on my recent visit to the Google campus. I was lucky enough to be invited by CPA.com to join 15 other CEO’s of major accounting firms to visit and learn from Google’s director of accounting, their staff and the director of cloud services. It was a tremendous networking and learning experience that opened my eyes to more insights for being future ready. But besides the large grocery bill (I ate twice while I was there) as the result of providing three meals a day on campus for team members, I learned not only why they buy lots of groceries but also several other valuable tidbits. 

I simply can’t get away from this Mark Twain quote about life, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so!” This has proven true so many times in my life and I always seem to be in the ditch before I even realize my treasured beliefs might not be right.

Do you ever have those moments when something strikes you as profound, but as you reflect on it you realize—well that’s just common sense? Why am I just realizing this? “Listening is caring” is profound for me simply because I had never intentionally connected the dots.

Lynne Doughtie, Chairman and CEO, KPMG, made a very profound statement at the AICPA Major Firms Group Meeting 2018 in Naples, Florida. She stated, “Now is the time to be getting future ready.” She went on to share how KPMG is taking action now to evolve their business model, services and advisory work. They are investing, designing and building a new training facility to provide a means to rapidly train team members with new skills to be future ready. They are not waiting on Now.

As the summer progressed, I felt myself losing some steam—my energy was too low. As I reflect on it now, I was having a few stomach aches along the way. Oddly enough, when I felt some abdominal pain, I would eat more. Sounds backward but I have always tried to eat my way through feeling bad. CeCe laughs at this every time and has been known to call me an idiot for doing so. (Please, no comments. I realize it might not be the best strategy.) So I am rocking along, eating my way through the pain, until my abdominal pain increased to the point that one Sunday evening I found myself curled up on our floor trying to ease the pain. That night I became violently ill. Thinking it was just food poisoning, I worked from home a day and then returned to work. But I knew something was wrong when I still felt weak and experienced the same abdominal pains.

Recently, I got a chance to run over to my camp near Eagle Lake, MS. My “Red Roof” cabin is one of my favorite getaways to recharge. It had been an unusually brutal and busy few weeks so this opportunity had me very excited. The weather was still warm so I knew as soon as I got the cabin swept out and stocked, I was headed straight to Paw Paw Bridge where the water flows out of the chute and back into the primary river system. This bridge can offer some of the best crappie fishing, which you might know is my favorite hobby.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about some of my favorite Pop Joe idioms. So far I’ve shared "You can get happy in those same britches that you got sad in," "Don’t make me pull this car over," and “Too much sugar for a dime.” For the final blog in this series, we have another Pop Joe classic, “We will cross that bridge when we get to it.”

So far, I've shared two of our favorite Pop Joe idioms, "You can get happy in those same britches that you got sad in," and "Don’t make me pull this car over." The third in this four-part series is one that many of us frequently hear or use but I wonder how often we stop and think about how powerful it could be in our business. Any time that Pop Joe thought something might be more trouble than it was worth he would say, “Too much sugar for a dime.” Now I have no idea where this saying started but I know Pop Joe picked it up and used it frequently around the house. Heck, I find myself saying it frequently when I am confronted with something that is frustrating me or appears to be overly cumbersome.