Now that tax season is over, you can rest a bit.
Was it a hard season? Want to make next tax season easier and more fun? Look no further than your client list. No matter how good your clients are, the best firms constantly evaluate who they are doing business with.
Often, very important areas of our businesses (and our lives) get ignored because we make these areas out to be much, much tougher than they actually are. Weeding through our client lists tends to be one of those areas.
Let me tell you a story about a recent household project we took on. We have a potter’s shed attached to the back of our house. It is a gardener’s dream. It lets in plenty of light to grow small plants into bigger ones. It has a sink and shelves so that you can have everything at your fingertips. Well, unfortunately it is wasted on us, as we are not gardeners. We managed to turn it into a catch-all storage room. Over time, it had gotten more than a little cluttered. It was one of those dreaded projects that just couldn’t be put off any more. So…my wife and I decided one Saturday to tackle the project. We decided to pull everything out of the shed and separate into one of three piles:
- Keep
- Sell
- Throw away
It made the project go very quickly and it was far easier than we had anticipated. Back to the project of evaluating clients…Try this. Go through your client list and put each client in one of these three “piles”:
- Keep
- Increase the price
- Refer to someone else
Hopefully, most of your clients will fall into category one. However, the people in category two and three are taking a disproportionate amount of your time and energy from your firm and that needs to be corrected. Want work to be more fun and easier? …then you need your time and energy for category number one.
