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…

“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…

Earlier this week David Maister posted Satisfaction Guaranteed on his website.  You can read it for yourself, but the essence is committing to a service and performance guarantee for the services you provide.  Several years ago we began including this language in our client service agreements:

“Our work is guaranteed to the satisfaction of the customer.  If you are not completely satisfied with the services performed by Mark Bailey and Company, Ltd., we will, at the option of the Company, refund the price or accept a portion of said price that reflects the Company’s level of satisfaction.” Read more…

Unquestionably, large mature accounting firms can have some distinct advantages.  As smaller firms can we overcome them and compete on the same level?

When I left the ‘Big 8′ (yes children, before it was the Big 4 it used to be the Big 8 back in the olden days) to practice with several other big firm refugees we were certain of the many opportunities that existed to invoke positive professional change, and do it better.  Like most teenagers, we knew it all – especially everything that was ‘wrong’.  We missed no opportunity to criticize.  And like most teenagers, we somehow missed all the things our former Big 8 employers had done that were ‘right’.  The naivete of youth.  And we were professionally youthful having only been recently emancipated.  Read more…

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…