If not, then why do you think you can do your own marketing effectively?  If your firm is like most firms, you periodically find yourself in need of legal representation, investment advice, insurance analysis, etc.  In most cases, you will retain a professional to help guide you.  We’ve had great counsel from many sources over the years, yet for many years when it came to one of the most fundamentally important functions critical to our healthy growth – marketing – we did it ourselves.  And not particularly well.

Simplistically there  are three aspects to a successful growth plan from a marketing perspective Read more…

Several years ago when our team members collectively drafted our mission statement,  one of the underlying principles defining who / what we are was “We strive to do more than our clients expect”.  Subsequently published on our web site as part of our culture, we endeavor to live up to it – not always as successfully as we would like, but nonetheless always attempted.  Unfortunately in our society the value of exceeding expectations is more often forgotten or ignored than practiced.  There aren’t a lot of great examples of companies or organizations who do this.  Two years ago, on yet another honeymoon, I experienced it first hand. Read more…

In a recent post on Trendlines, Gary Boomer held forth on the staffing crisis in our profession.  Succinct and to the point, Boomer lists four reasons.  While all four are valid, my experience over the past five years has identified one as being most significant – Firms with low retention and high staff turnover work their associates too many hours.  It’s not rocket science. Read more…

Just read Michelle Golden’s post on sending out mass mailings.  I thought it was very funny, and says so much about why we are so turned off by most of the mail we get today.

But most of all, I thought it also shows the value of criticism.  I read the other day, that the best thing you can hear as a company is a criticism, because that’s when you have the chance to improve.  If you never hear them, you can never get better. Read more…

“Thank you” goes a long way. Many firms have survived their “busy season”  (whatever that is)  and I’m sure management planned some food n’ booze event to thank their staff, but I just want to remind people that saying “thank you” can go a long way for morale, and it’s free. So don’t wait until the end of next busy season to say it again.

There are numerous posts on this site that begin to break the surface of the difference in culture at our firm, but one of the biggest things I’ve noticed is communication. The partners in this firm reach out to us on a daily basis; simple things like, “how’s it going, “hey, nice work on that…” or “I just want to thank you for all your hard work on this.” Or sometimes they just tease me but they know I can handle it. Read more…

I hailed from a large international accounting firm and like most of my coworkers there I became sick of the long work hours and never ending cycle of stress and emotional guilt tripping that comes with trying to justify going home after just ten or twelve hours. Searching for another job was difficult, as I rarely had a minute that wasn’t filled by working, commuting or sleeping. But the most substantial barrier to quitting my big accounting firm job was the myths that circulated concerning small firms. Read more…

Did you suck at ‘Economics’ in college.  I did.  So when my friend and mentor, Ron Baker, recommended that I read The Economic Naturalist by Robert Frank, I smiled politely, assured him I would, and then blew it off.  (I did buy it, just so I could document my intent and not feel entirely guilty for lying through my teeth.)  Last week, I again found myself in an airport, having mistakenly thrown this tome in my computer case, thinking it was an adventure novel.  With no other entertainment, besides trying to determine which passenger had the worst hang-over in the Las Vegas airport, I read the book. Read more…

I’ve posted frequently about the deleterious effect I believe time sheets have on professional knowledge workers and professional knowledge firms. Regardless of the origin, or the use for which they were originally intended they have become at once a measurement of productivity, value, worth and efficiency. And I don’t believe they do any of those things particularly well. Granted they can generate useful and important information for reactive decision making but the costs of that information to the culture of the user far outweigh any marginal benefit derived. They are a very efficient tool for micromanaging. There are other very efficient micromanagement tools as well. There are performance evaluations - which we’ve previously posted about. How about ‘checklists’? Read more…

In my recent post, Beware the Jabberwock, I intended to suggest that as practitioners we always question what is the ‘common body of knowledge’ and accepted management philosophy we have been indoctrinated with over the past 50 years.  My comments were not directed specifically at Ric Payne or Principia, but rather at traditional thinking, while I did use one of Ric’s posts as an example.  My comments were apparently interpreted as a personal attack based on Ric’s comment which we have posted.  After again reading my post, I do see it could be interpreted as a personal attack.   That was not my intent, and I sincerely apologize. Read more…

“Twas brillig and the slithey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe,  all mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe.”

Written by Lewis Carroll, his poem “Jabberwocky’ in “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There” is considered the most famous nonsensical poem in the English language.  It was certainly one of my favorites during my alcoholiclly impaired college years in the 1960′s.  It re-occurred to me today as I read a post by Ric Payne on the Principa blog titled Time Based Billing is Unethical – What Rubbish.  Read more…