This article, "5 ways to get 5x ROI from your team," originally appeared on AccountingWeb.com.
Are you getting the most from your team? Have you measured the ROI on your chargeable team members? If you have a nagging feeling that you should be getting more, AVN’s Shane Lukas explains how to do it (without turning into a slave-driver).
Canva
In an ideal world, your team should make your life easier by reducing the pressure on you to do everything. They should give you the time to move away from day-today operations and focus on strategy. And of course, they should earn more income than they cost (depending on their role).
Do your chargeable team members tick all those boxes?
If they’re earning you less than a 5x return on your investment in them, then there’s massive room for improvement.
Here are 5 things you can do to generate at least 5x return on your chargeable employees.
1. If you’re using timesheets… STOP USING TIMESHEETS!
Why? There are a several reasons but essentially, they keep the focus on time spent rather than value delivered to the client. Tracking and logging time is an extra pressure on an already busy team, and it’s not a great incentive to help them do their best work. That time could be much better spent in identifying and bringing additional value to the client.
2. Opportunity spotting
A common reason why clients change accountants is because they didn’t know their existing accountant could deliver a service they really needed. This is a missed opportunity for you. Encourage your team to spot opportunities where you could deliver a service that’s relevant to the client and then bring this into their discussions. This shouldn’t be a sales pitch. Through meaningful conversations, asking questions and listening to the answers, they will be able to identify these opportunities and present them in a natural, non-salesy way.
Many of these additional services are high value, low effort and – if priced properly – can be highly profitable.
3. Value pricing
Are you value pricing your services? Or do you give a fixed price based on an estimate of the time it will take? Which in effect, takes you back to prioritising time over the results for your client.
The best value pricing strategy involves ramping up the value you provide, demonstrating that value effectively and making it relevant to your client. Then you can price your services in a way that generates more profit and means your client is happy to pay higher fees.
4. Put a client manager structure in place
Be honest, are you the bottleneck in your practice? Are you still dealing with tasks that your team should really be handling? Do clients only want to talk to you? When you shift to a client manager structure, you can take a step back from the day-today to focus on the bigger picture. Of course, your team still need your support, but with this structure in place, you’ll have the time to help them develop their skills. At AVN we’ve seen this happen again and again, with the practice owner being able to reduce their hours and at the same time, increase both turnover and personal earnings.
5. Train your team to deliver advisory
Advisory is such a broad term, isn’t it? And I know that it can sound much more daunting than it really is. By my definition, advisory is sound business improvement advice that can naturally be given by an accountant because it fits with your skills and training in numbers. When you think of it this way, it becomes much easier to do. And it means that your team can deliver these kinds of services too, not just you or people with decades of experience. We find that that AVN members are typically charging several thousand pounds more per client for providing these services. And what’s more, their team are delivering them and the clients are happy. (And by the way, these aren’t all large clients. They’re just business owners who can see the opportunity for growth because the accountant has demonstrated the value).
Get these five things right and your ROI on team members will start to soar.
I do realise that these are significant changes to implement if you aren’t doing things this way already. So I’d suggest starting small and getting one of them absolutely nailed before moving on to the next.
Need some help? At AVN we’ve been supporting accountants to make these kinds of changes for more than two decades. We can’t help everyone of course, and we only work with firms who we know are ready to change. If that’s you, the first step is to book a discovery call where we can find out a little more and see if we’re right for each other. There are no strings, no selling, no pressure.
Book your call here: https://www.avn.co.uk/bookacall/