Our Firm's Purpose, Part One

I want to explore the purpose of our firm over a series of posts. I’m not sure if all companies with a purpose statement are serious about it, but we are. Extremely serious. Each word means something to us, and we train, teach, guide, and learn around fulfilling our purpose. We lead our team, fire our clients, and double our prices because of what our purpose statement means. Here it is (it’s on the front of our website too):

“We proactively lead clients to equip them for growth.”

This first post is around our desire to be proactive. This is a huge request from almost every single client to every single accounting firm in the world. Small business owners want a firm that is proactive. Why? Because a small business owner is not in the business of providing accounting, tax, and payroll help to themselves. And since small business clients don’t know how to do this for themselves, they don’t typically know what to ask a firm to provide for them. So if a small business client is unaware of what they need, their main hope is that the firm will not only know what they need, but will be proactive to provide it for them, even if the small business client doesn’t ask for it. The small business community is almost at a disadvantage to get great financial and tax care because of their lack of knowledge about these subjects.

Enter a proactive firm.

But a firm can’t just say they are proactive. They have to restructure their pricing, their team, and their processes to actually be proactive. Proactivity is a constant culture you live in a firm if you are to be truly proactive.

Pricing Proactively

We meet with each new client to determine what they need. There are no prices on our website because we don’t have prices. We only have clients that need services. So we calculate prices based upon what our clients need. It can take up to a month to meet with the potential new client, determine their needs, calculate prices, and present those prices to them. Inherent in this process is our documentation of the scope of what we will do for the price we have offered. Now that we know the price and the scope, we can plug all of the details of our contract with this new client into our workflow CRM. We now have a roadmap to guide us through providing our service to this client. They don’t need to ask us “can we do tax planning this quarter?” because our workflow system (and our Project Manager who leads this effort internally) reminds us to reach out to them first. This setup is proactive by nature.

Proactive Team

We then assign each new client to a team member called a Customer Ally. The Customer Ally is meant to fulfill the contract with the client. They oversee the client’s needs, and the client is able to reach out to the Customer Ally for anything they need. We will even limit the number of clients assigned to a Customer Ally so that the Customer Ally is fully able to focus on meeting the needs of their clients. Along with the support of our Project Manager, the Customer Ally reaches out to the client to remind them of services we are providing, and initiates particular services so the client doesn’t have to think about receiving the services we promised.

Proactive Processes

We have developed internal Project Management processes in our firm so that someone can be responsible for making sure all of this pricing, work creation, and team priorities are getting done. It’s true that a Customer Ally can become overwhelmed during busy seasons. So the Project Manager is meant to care for the Customer Ally by helping them focus on priorities and prioritize which clients we are meant to be serving during each season of the year. We use a platform that summarizes our work by the responsible team member and due date. And when the Project Manager and the Customer Ally are meeting, they are focused on our platform that manages our proactive processes.

It takes a full team to care for clients proactively. It’s not rocket science, but it takes a lot of work. Proactive may be a buzzword for so many, but it takes a restructured culture to truly pull it off day to day. At Blumer CPAs, we work hard to be proactive! Are you struggling with your accounting firm being proactive with your creative agency? Email us at [email protected] and see how we can proactively help you!