Improving client engagement, driving growth, and differentiation in the market should be top of mind for any progressive accounting firm looking to evolve for its clients.
Firms looking to the future need to continually challenge themselves to ensure these remain a priority. We identifiy five key strategies to help them stay in front.
1) Remove barriers to change
Accounting firms need to ensure they continually evolve to become more client-centric, as client expectations and behaviours change.
However, there can often be a number of barriers that get in the way of a firm’s offering evolving and it is important to identify these.
Traditional business models often create siloed units and the partner-client ownership mentality.
The result of this is partners protect their individual client relationships, and can restrict the offering of other services to the client.
More progressive firms are breaking down these silos by changing reporting lines, revising equity models and introducing a more collaborative culture focussed on satisfying clients’ needs while growing the overall revenue of the firm.
We have seen a growing number of firms making significant changes to future firm succession and have created a culture of client centricity.
In most cases, the business leader, whether it is a managing partner or a chief executive, maintains some client interactivity. However, a large percentage of time is spent on breaking down internal barriers, increasing performance transparency, and most importantly, holding staff to account when adopting a more collaborative culture.
The primary responsibility of the business leader is to ensure key projects are completed on time and data and analytics are used more effectively across the firm to make difficult and informed decisions.
2) Staff are a firm’s biggest asset
With a greater share of value coming from client-facing activities, business leaders should look within their firm to ensure they have the right range and mix of staff members.
Regardless of the role, it is critical that staff not only have the capabilities they are looking for, but also fit within the firm’s culture and offer the same consistently high experience to clients.
Consistency of experience can become more and more challenging for firms as they experience change and turnover, but it remains critically important.
At all levels of a business, it is crucial to ensure interactions with clients are a positive experience.
A great way to assist members of a team to develop these client interaction skills is through mentoring and training.
For a junior member of staff, it can be very beneficial to see senior colleagues having high quality conversations with clients. It allows them to take the learnings from these situations and use them for their own future client dealings.
Acknowledging individual skill sets and directing staff to do activities that play to their strengths results in staff feeling more confident in their own ability and clients interacting with those staff members with strong relationship management skills.
Introducing or evolving roles that are mainly focussed on new client acquisition and broadening out the services used by existing clients are really important.
Staff need to feel like they belong to a team, are engaged and have a sense of purpose, rather than the focus being solely on their remuneration level and measurable outputs.
It is about finding an approach that works for the firm and staff members, while also building the right team environment throughout the business.
Examples that can help to not only boost team morale, but overall engagement levels as well include offering flexible working hours to parents who have just returned from maternity or paternity leave, or helping to ensure working parents’ hours fit around child care.
3) Diversity is essential to drive performance
A diverse workplace can bring a level of competitive advantage to any accounting firm by inspiring innovation and creativity.
Attracting and retaining a diverse workforce, whether it is in age, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity, should be essential in any firm’s business strategy as with diversity of thought, problems or decisions can be solved more quickly and productively — and usually with stronger results.
This is also something to consider when hiring staff. For example, when it comes to hiring graduates, think outside the box.
We are increasingly seeing more firms hiring graduates who do not necessarily have the traditional accounting degree and the required technical skills for the role, but offer a range of different skill sets, such as in IT, business, or even law.
Once these firms have hired the graduate, they are providing on-the-job training and mentoring to develop their accounting skills and are seeing the benefit.
4) Embracing data and technology is imperative to success
For any business looking to evolve with an eye to the future, technology is increasingly playing a key role.
Technology is not only changing the way companies engage with their clients, it is also allowing work to be managed more efficiently and securely.
When it comes to investing in new technology, it is important that firms assess the data that is available to them, ensuring the technology can help them turn data into meaningful insights.
More often than not, firms only leverage a small amount of the data available to them, which means they are missing out on insights and opportunities for both clients and the firm.
More progressive firms use data to drive consistent decisions, enhance productivity, develop strategies and increase services per client.
Firms are also increasingly looking to specialist data management systems that help them to access, analyse and serve up the data in a meaningful way.
The firms using these systems, often referred to as data warehouse systems, are leveraging this information to provide the much desired one client view.
Embracing data is also allowing firms to better plan for future growth and cloud-based accounting technology is improving efficiencies, giving staff members more time to engage with clients.
5) Keep evolution front of mind
At the end of the day, the potential for the evolution of a business lies solely within the firm.
Those who continually look for new ways to improve client engagement and do business, whether they are small or big changes, will ultimately help to increase their top line growth and differentiate themselves in the market.
Continuous improvement should be a regular part of the business planning and review process, and not something considered separate to their everyday activity. Highly satisfied clients lead to greater referrals, so the potential for the growth of any business lies firmly within their hands.
Firms that are outstripping growth take evolution seriously. Some firms have introduced a business improvement specialist, responsible for improving efficiencies, reducing project times and removing roadblocks.
Other firms who cannot afford the additional headcount have focussed on becoming more agile, and skilling the existing key team up in effective project management.
David Clatworthy is the head of accounting segment for Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services Group.
