beBetter 

This blog is the third part of a series meant to outline the Four Building Blocks to Move to Advisory Services.

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. Last week, we discussed the first block: MINDSET SHIFT. Today, we'll discuss the second block: CONFIDENCE. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

A few weeks ago, I presented at the 2017 Southeastern Accounting Show hosted by the Georgia Society of CPA’s. Leaving, I found myself stunned by the lack of preparedness of our profession from a grassroots perspective. And I wondered—as we look into the mirror, are we spiraling towards irrelevancy because we are fooling ourselves?

Recently, I was fortunate to participate in an intense brainstorming session on the future of our profession with six other top 100 CPA managing partners. One of the hot topics was the very evident need for our profession to provide more advisory insights and services to our clients. With oncoming automation around data input and analysis, we know our services need to evolve into more advisory type services. We discussed that our "trusted advisor" status is anchored too closely to compliance, transactional and historical type services. Primarily, we have been a very responsive profession where few have consistently served as proactive strategic advisors.

My wife, CeCe, and I just finished a home defense course which, like CPR, is simply great training and awareness. I started the course at the request of CeCe so I was a little skeptical of the overall value of the course. In the first afternoon, we learned the importance of three keywords to the foundation of good home and self-defense. Aware, was the first stage. As we walk to our car or answer the front door, we should be head up and alert to any possible dangers rather than head down, reading our last text message. Then, if you identify danger or a situation that could be dangerous, you immediately move into escape mode and look for the easiest ways to put distance or cover between you and the danger. Then if you are unable to avoid the danger, you confront it and defend yourself. Even yelling in a very loud voice that you see them or stop it can have a significant effect on the situation.