Recently I was asked by a former tax partner of an international firm how we measured the productivity of our associates given that we no longer keep time sheets. Ignoring for the moment that Peter Block has already answered that question in his book The Answer to How is Yes, I have more than one issue with this question. Read more…

Recently, Bob Nugent the Chief Financial Officer for Scolari’s Markets, a chain retail grocer in Northern Nevada and one of our favorite and most valued clients, gave our firm a compliment that created a HSD for me. (HSD is the acronym for High Satisfaction Day – a phrase I first heard from author Ron Baker.) We had recently completed several projects for Scolari’s, which had involved several of our team members. Bob, not known for lavishing unsolicited praise in the thirty years I’ve known him, told me how impressed he was with the knowledge, professionalism and service level he had received from our associates. Read more…

When Mark first suggested eliminating performance evaluations, I was appalled. How would our aspiring professionals get the feedback that they so desperately needed? Then I started to think back. And being a pack rat, I looked back at my old performance evaluations. And realized that I had been writing rebuttals to performance evaluations since the very beginning of my professional career. Read more…

In a post by Rita Keller on CPA Management she advocates the practice of publishing rankings of the firms associates. It would seem this is a practice of Moss Adams, a large national firm. The post titled Ranking Your Individual Team Members doesn’t provide specifics as to what the criteria that were used in the ranking scheme by Moss Adams. They state that you should rank people by the criteria that are important to your firm. The article goes on to state that the staff felt it was a positive motivator and “no one quit”. (Yet!) Read more…