In today’s dynamic business environment, accountants in public practice, are ideally placed to offer CFO services to their clients. As trusted advisors, accountants typically have a good understanding of their clients’ businesses and can use their wealth of experience to “add value”.
The ever changing nature of the public accounting environment necessitates that practitioners continue to diversify and to reduce their dependence on compliance on routine tax and accounting work. By offering CFO services, accountants create the opportunity of introducing a new fee stream and at the same time, introducing new and challenging work for their staff. Typically, larger and more proactive clients will be receptive – remember, if they have only tasted sausages, they don’t know what steak tastes like! If you don’t offer these value adding services, perhaps one of your competitors will! Likewise, this service can also be offered to non-clients with the possibility of them becoming clients.
Many practitioners under-estimate their own personal skills set and experience, creating an uncertainty and lack of confidence about providing non-traditional services. Whilst recognising these issues, also realise that it is not difficult to develop related financial management skills.
To this end, we suggest that practitioners “practise what they preach” by first focussing on their own practices. By systematically adopting and working through the following steps, practitioners will, not only be gaining a better insight into their own firms, but will also be preparing themselves for working with their clients:
- Develop a Strategic Plan
- Develop a Business Plan
- Develop a Succession Plan
- Develop a “Three Way” Budget and Cash Flow Forecast including Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow projections
- Conduct a Business Health Assessment identifying problems and opportunities
- Measure Return on Investment and set realistic target
- Assess internal systems, costing and pricing
We encourage firms to consider the above opportunity and if considered worthy, to develop a plan, including dedicating time and internal resources to achieve a positive outcome.
Author: Geoff Storey CPA CA, Alliance Advisor with ATL Network