How to Know if You Are Ready to Buy a CPA Practice
Are you thinking about buying a CPA practice? Would you like a tool to assess your readiness?
We developed just such a tool and called it our Buyer Scorecard. We took our database of buyers and pulled out the people who had been especially successful.
We got together as a team and asked ourselves:
1. What are the common characteristics of these people?
2. What are the attributes that seem to be the drivers of success?
From these two questions, we came up with 8 attributes of successful CPA firm buyers; and from this eight we developed our Buyer Scorecard.
This is a self-assessment tool, you take each of the 8 attributes and give yourself a score from 1 to 12. The beauty of this exercise is that it’s going to do one of two things: it’s either going to help you identify areas where you need to improve and give you things you need work on in order to buy (we’ve seen people inquire about a practice and not buy for 3 or 4 years because they aren’t quite ready, they just didn’t have the skill-set needed), or, you may do really well on this scorecard and say, “I’m ready to buy!” and this tool just gave you the clarity and confidence to go forward.
