Being your own boss is great, as long as you know how to be a good one. I have had my own accounting practice for 25 years, but had never really learned how to manage it properly. I was working about 2600 hours a year, little vacation time, and not much left for family life—except I had just gotten engaged and needed to create time for family life.
It was clear my practice and my life could benefit from a management expert. So about a year ago, when I got a post card in the mail from Sterling, my partner/fiancé and I sent off for their practice management DVD and then decided to give them a try.
Sterling taught us a complete, comprehensive system for organizing our practice. I came away from the training with a new way of looking at things. My partner and I learned to break operations down into its component parts and smoothly dovetail each and every function so the different tasks became coordinated between staff. Our job descriptions; our phone messages, emails and faxes; our office timekeeping codes; and even our paper-based and paperless filing systems all now follow this same organizational structure. It is not a complex system; not at all like Title 26, for example, where you have to keep on top of thousands of pages of arcane rules that change every year. It is a simple, understandable system that, once you learn the basics, you can use to bring order to your accounting practice and your personal life. Additionally, we learned an exact way to measure how performance in each area and specific formulas to follow that would keep each area—and the business as a whole—moving in the right direction.
While the accounting profession deals with numbers, what makes an accounting practice successful is people. I learned to be a more effective leader and how to understand what “makes people tick.” I learned how to spot and deal with the types of people—staff and clients—you want to have on your team and those who will only mean disaster.
I made a number of immediate changes to the way I was running the practice and the results were immediately visible. Staff cooperation and coordination smoothed out and our billings rose twenty percent! Our long term prospects are even better. These actions are setting up me up for long term success with continual practice growth. Not only that, but I will be able to have a good home life as well. Let me invite you to look into Sterling more closely. Call 800-933-7538 or request their complimentary DVD by clicking here.
Randall Hancock, CPA
