If your practice is roughly generating between one and two million dollars per year, you may find yourself caught between the proverbial rock and the hard place.
Firms this size have a lot of responsibility and often not enough size to have their teams properly specialize. The result is that owners are often spread too thinly. The more lines of work you are trying to do, the worse your problems probably are. No accountant can be good at everything in this profession. It is just too complex.
Firms of this size often display some or all of the following symptoms:
- Lower net cash flow to owner. (Especially for the amount of work going out the door.)
- Owner trying to wear too many hats and ineffective when wearing most of those hats.
- High levels of frustration.
- Inability to get real traction.
- The worst one of all-owner hours are way too high.
So how do you fix it?
You have to decide who you want to be when you grow up. Do you want to be small or do you want to be big? Regardless of what you decide, the next step is to prune, prune, and then prune some more until you have your wits about you again. You must first create capacity. Then, based on your decision to be big or small, you can either stop and be happy or – decide with a great deal of focus and intention -how you want to go about becoming big.
About Brannon Poe: Brannon is the founder of Poe Group Advisors and has been facilitating successful accounting practice transitions throughout the US and Canada since 2003. He is also the creator of Accounting Practice Academy. Brannon is the author of the Accounting Practice Insights Blog and hosts the Accountant’s Flight Plan” podcast with other top thought-leaders in the accounting profession. Brannon is an E&Y alumnus.
He has worked with some of the most successful and seasoned CPAs in the industry and has been privy to the behind-the-scenes methods that these clients have used to build highly profitable practices along with capable and independent teams. Brannon has authored multiple books, including Accountant’s Flight Plan – Best Practices for Today’s Firms (published by both the AICPA and CPA Canada) and On Your Own: How to Start Your Own CPA Firm, Second Edition (published by the AICPA). Brannon is passionate about entrepreneurship and is the president-elect of EO Charleston (Entrepreneur’s Organization)