Member Blogs

I wear a lot of hats. One I make sure to put on everyday is the marketing hat. I try to carve out time to grow the business whether it is some small listings or more timely network meetings. I will take on the harder jobs out there.  I'm confident in my skills.  If I can't do it because of lack of technical skills I will be honest & direct the client to a colleague.  Of course I always have the client mention my name and when I see the colleague I will bring it up to let them know I'm marketing their business too. A good amount of my new accounts come from word of mouth from existing happy clients or social network contacts that I try to stay current with. It is work but it doesn't have to take a lot of time.  Example: A friend dropped by & gave me a business card for a friend he had that needs help with an audit.  I do not do audit work but I will help the client get ready for the audit and have all records in order so they pay less in fees because of organization.  They save the high dollars for the attestation they really need for the audit.  Once I'm in I'll start streamlining processes and helping the client become more profitable if I can see clear steps to be taken.

This week I had to prepare 4 years of back tax returns or the consequences were serious and the records were lacking.  At the end of the week I can say that we really busted these returns out.  Some years were done manually.  There were 2 different tax programs handling the other years.  At 5:30p today all returns had been finished.  We need abatement letters we are doing tomorrow.  The taxpayer is disabled so the returns will be taken to her home personally and signed, etc.  Then we will send them all individually return receipt requested just to make it easy on our client.  That was the marketing hat for me (making it easy).

I've also been retained to write a business plan.  The owners really tried but got lost around page 51.  I sat with them and told them I would use the work they already provided and tweak from there.  I'll also add in some financial statements and sales forecasting.  This one is a fun business and I'm trying to get into the spirit of the product.  I feel confident I can get this done quickly.  After the business plan; I have quite a few more jobs in progross.  I made a Work-In-Progress (WHIP) Form that tell staff all the jobs we have in and who is responsible.  It even figures into the cash flow projections.