This one may not be as stupid as it is a mistake or sometimes a different view of value. But sometimes it is just stupid. Now, this is a process. Sometimes a long one. First, you have to understand what you are worth, AND you have to come to an understanding of what your customer values. Then you have to have the guts to play in that market at those prices.
We talk a lot about pricing on the THRIVEcast and it’s a topic we coach our clients on regularly. Pricing is huge and it’s an art form. We may get it right several times in a row, and then make a major error pricing the next customer. Need help? Let us know!
Ready for another THRIVEcast? Listen to my discussion with Greg about the barbell strategy of risk and our interview with Rafi Mohammed, author of The 1% Windfall. Check it out!
One stupid thing you may be doing as a business owner is wasting time reading People magazine instead of Inc. magazine. Fame and celebrity is something created in our own minds and pushed by media. Following your favorite celeb is fine, but it isn’t likely to do you any good in your business unless that celebrity is your customer.
Instead, invest your valuable reading time in good books, blogs, and magazines that will enhance your business processes and interactions with your customers. Invest in an Audible subscription or download podcasts that can help you think about your business in a new way.
Here are a few of each type of media that we recommend:
As you gather your documents to deliver to us for tax season (digitally, right?), please know that non-prescription medicine no longer qualifies as an expense for health plan reimbusements or withdrawals from your HSA. Tax changes. Good times for all.
“Improve seems to be getting better at what you already do, whereas transform means getting good at something you’ve not been doing. That’s a bigger jump.”
We are ready for you! Tax Season 2012 is upon us and from now until April 17th, we are in for a crazy ride. Did you tell us which tax package you want to go with yet? Are you armed and ready with your secure online portal so that you can upload your documents to us digitally?
Here are a few things you need to know for this tax season (and a heads up about where we are headed for NEXT tax season too).
1. No more paper. Really. We don’t need it. We would love to help you set up your portal so that you can upload your tax documents for us this year. However, if you need to bring us paper, we’ll scan it in to our files and send it back home with you. Don’t worry! We have coffee, sodas, and snacks for you while you wait. And wifi too. See?
When your return is complete, you can view it and print it from your portal. You can even sign the efile forms digitally. We’ll walk you through the process. It’s not scary. Promise.
Heads up for next year…we probably won’t have an office to bring paper to at all! Need help learning how to use a scanner? We’ll help with that so that next year you can just upload your docs from home. No worries! And NO PAPER!
2. New hours. Yes, we work pretty much non-stop during tax season, but we will not be open for business 24/7. If you need to stop by, you can drop in between 9am and 5pm on Monday through Thursday. We’re going to use Fridays to work our tails off finishing your taxes. (Saturdays too most likely) You may hear from us via email or the phone, but we aren’t open on Fridays.
Heads up for after tax season and beyond: After April 17th, we are going to appointment only meetings. Most of us work from home so if you drop by, you might not even get to see us anyway! Which brings us to the next heads up…we really are closing the office by the end of the year. Not closing the firm, just the office.
We love to serve you. Let us know if you have questions. Shoot us an email if you want to talk to us about providing you with a scanner and some training so that you can interact with us digitally!
You may say, “I love doing what I started this business to do.” If you are a designer, you love to design. If you own a landscaping company, you love landscaping. If you are a CPA, you love accounting. That’s great! But as your business grows, you will be required to let go of the details or they will consume you. You can’t do it all. You’ll have to give up some of the designing or landscaping to sell, keep up with your books, etc. I rarely do taxes anymore. I don’t manage my own calendar either. And I am in the process of even handing over my email. We think no one can ever do what we do as well as we do, but we are wrong. Let people help you, or let go of growing your company.
Tell us what you hate about running your business. Maybe we can solve that pain point for you so you can get back to doing the tasks you love.
“Overused words do not work. Instead of relying on words at all, offer evidence. Offer the compelling stories—the case studies, awards, business growth, achivements—that make those adjectives unnecessary.”
Watching Simon Sinek’s video and reading his book has lead us to create our own ‘Why’ statement. Everyone needs to know why they exist, and it really helps when you write it down. Your customers want to know why you exist too.
Here is our ‘Why’ statement:
“We exist to help creative customers enjoy their work and lives more deeply by managing the technical side of their business with effective technologies and provide them with business intelligence through challenging coaching and deeper education.”
More than anything else, we want to know who we are NOT for. It saves everyone such heartache when we know who we are supposed to be serving. If you come into our firm, and we are not best for you, then you will not like our firm, and we will probably not like you as a customer. It sucks to be in this place. But if you ARE right for us, then we are ready to change your life and you are probably ready to receive it too!
A ‘Why’ statement helps to avoid the wrong customer and solely focus on the right customer. And it helps to let your ‘Why’ statement be the foundation on which you stand for all strategy decisions like,
Should I offer this service?
Should I hire this person?
Should I grow in this way?
Are we right for this customer?
Are we wrong for this customer?
Are we ready to grow bigger?
You ‘why’ will be your go-to statement that you can base your decisions on. To be sure, it will show a lot of people that you are not the right provider for them… but that is exactly what you want. You need to stop serving the people you should not be serving. You need to be focusing on those that you can add value to and change their lives.
In 2012, why not stop doing business… and start changing lives?
“A winner is someone who recognizes his God-given talents, works his tail off to develop them into skills, and uses these skills to accomplish his goals.”
“Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
Hey Business Owners, have you listened to the THRIVEcast yet? Well, this episode is the one for you! No geeky accounting junk in this one. Just common sense for your business.
Newsflash: As a business, you exist to bring value to your customers. Let that sink in for a minute. I’m not saying the customer is always right. But you do exist to meet their needs.
Let me tell you a true story about how crappy company policy totally messed with me recently.
You know we love getting rid of paper. We were pumped to finally be past the point of holding onto old file boxes from the civil war era (or over 7 to 8 years old) so we told a shredding company to come pick up 10 boxes. Then we found 3 more old boxes. Woo hoo! A couple of weeks later, they came by to get our boxes. Problem. They thought they were there to get 10 bags. Boxes. Bags. Apples. Oranges. Just take my old files out of my office and shred them.
Nope.
Company policy had this shredding company’s truck driver’s hands tied. He was on such a tight schedule that even though I was going to pay him more, he just couldn’t take my 13 boxes because it would have put him like 5 whole minutes behind freakin’ schedule. Huh?
Lots of discussion later…
The guy took my boxes and shredded them to the tune of $3.50 a MINUTE. I wasn’t happy because it took so much begging just to get there. He wasn’t happy because he had to call and get approval from some higher up to take my boxes. Good job shredding company on making the schedule and the policy more important that serving me.
I’m wondering what policies we have that might be hurting our awesome customers. We are here to bring you value. If we are being stupid, let’s talk. We don’t want to frustrate you like the shredding company frustrated us. You rock!
Proverbs 15:22 says, ” Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed.” One stupid thing business owners do is NOT have a coach. I have had a few coaches over the past 8 years and I know I’ve been more successful as a result of this coaching. The more counselors you allow into your life, the more opportunities you have to catch your errors before they get out of hand. You also have the gift of running your creative ideas by others, which can lead to even MORE creative ideas. Coaching also provides needed accountability for acting on those ideas.
We are preparing for tax season as we speak. Sounds fun, right? I’m sure you envy us. : ) But we love to serve you, so we are looking forward to that opportunity again.
We’ll be doing some different things this year to deliver greater options to you and seriously increase the value we deliver in the preparation of your individual tax returns.
These changes apply to individual tax returns only.
Value and Transparency
This year, you will have four options to choose from as we serve your individual tax return needs: Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Basic. We want these options to bring transparency in what we will do for you while allowing you to choose the value you perceive in each option. You get to choose your price according to what YOU need and value (as long as no major changes have happened throughout the year)! Here are the details:
Under the Gold Tax Package, we will deliver your completed return to you within 4 days of you delivering all of your tax information to our office and your tax return price payment. We will also give you one Life Coaching Session with Jason, and provide tax planning in the fall. This package will be 80% higher than your tax price in 2010.
Under the Silver Tax Package, we will deliver your completed return to you within 8 days of you delivering all of your tax information to our office and your tax return price payment. We will also provide tax planning in the fall. This package will be 40% higher than your tax price in 2010.
Under the Bronze Tax Package, we will deliver your completed return to you within 14 days of you delivering all of your tax information to our office and your tax return price payment. We will also provide tax planning in the fall. This package will be 15% higher than your tax price in 2010.
Under the Basic Tax Package, we will extend your return to be completed during non-busy season hours, to be completed within one month after the tax deadline filing date (which is April 16th this year). But you will receive a 10% LOWER price than your tax price in 2010.
Now you have total choice! For those that value a quick turn around time, we’ve provided that option for you. And for those of you who value lower prices more than a quick turn around time, you get to have your way too! We know you’ll have questions about these options, so feel free to reply to this email and ask questions.
What to do next? Once you tell us which package you want to choose, all you have to do is provide your 2011 tax information to us after January 15th, AND bring your payment (payment is required before we begin on your return) and we’ll do the rest! Thanks for letting us serve you!!
This month our guests, Ron Baker and Ed Kless, discuss the evils of the billable hour and timesheets. Listen in to hear how the value pricing model can change your business.
“Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.”
You know we love making the cloud blow the minds of creative people all over the freakin’ globe. It’s not always easy, but we are experts at scouring the web to find direct integrations, third-party integrators or actually hook up two cloud products right through another product. We’ll search out anything to hook stuff together in the cloud to make our awesome customers paperless and their business solutions seamless.
We’ve been working with the integration partners below - some for a while, and some are new to our firm. But we are learning so much about how to make Xero the cloud eco-system platform you need to make your biz hum!
Here is what we can do:
1. Bust a move on implementing Xero in your creative firm, educate you on the product and make you more business-savvy,
2. Integrate a partner to allow you to go paperless - all receipts and paper route through shoeboxed and are held online for your access no matter where you are,
3. These receipts are automatically routed into your Xero account (no manual entry) and matched to your bank feeds,
4. We can also now integrate Bill.com with these products and allow you to pay all of your bills online, without ever having to write a check again. You can have Bill.com either write checks for you or direct deposit cash in anyone’s bank account that you want. Sweet.
5. We can hook up your Shopify account to Xero too if you need it. This is sometimes an alternative to hooking PayPal directly up to your Xero account (we’ve painfully learned recently that there are API call volume limits on this integration).
6. We can hook up your online merchant account to a payment system gateway that can allow your customers to pay you electronically.
7. We can take your receipts and apply them directly to credit cards being managed in Xero. Again, paperless. So snap a picture and shred that crap!
8. We can produce some cool Xero reports in full or in summary formats that make them easier for Creatives to swallow.
9. We can actually take over your accounting department on the Xero platform now. Just say so.
10. Need a more robust paperless document management system? We do that too, dang it. We have a partner in SmartVault and we’ll deploy a paperless system for you and even send you a freakin’ scanner (because we hate paper and so do you). We’ll tie the cloud-based document management system right to your Mac or Windows desktop so you can access your stuff when you need it.
All of these hook ups can allow you to strategically eliminate paper from your life and your business while using some of the most innovative products on the web. And for firms that allow us to manage all of their accounting on a monthly basis, we also pull all US payroll data right into Xero for you (because there is no US-based payroll integration partner as of yet).
Do you hate paper tying you to your office?
Do you want to implement a workflow to your business process?
Do you want to use Xero but don’t know how?
Do you need a firm solely dedicated to the creative professions?
Then bring it! Email us at info [at] blumercpas [dawt] com if interested.
A huge mistake some business owners make is to not realize how their profession is changing…right before their eyes.
I’m a big proponent of questioning the status quo. I want you to question your profession’s methods, processes, and its future. If your industry is changing and you don’t notice, then you are already being left behind by your competition. Study your industry and duly note its course! We can help coach you through this process if you are really ready to move forward!
I talk so much about the strategy behind running a professional creative firm, that I am proud to introduce the Blumer CPAs Creative Coaching Course beginning January 2012! Hot dang.
I’ve already run a course similar to this in another setting, and it was very successful! Group coaching among your peers will change your life! I’ve been involved in one-on-one coaching for many years, and group coaching as well. Both serve different purposes and can help you in different ways. In group coaching, I act as the facilitator, keep everyone on track and keep us all challenged as we progress through the course together. We use an awesome online interactive learning platform where you will do the work and answer the questions from each assignment and link to the live sessions.
Each month, this course will include required reading of the assignments (1 hour to 1.5 hours), answering the required 8 to 12 questions (30 minutes to 1 hour) and then participation monthly in a live online session (1.5 hours) with the other creative group members around the country. The group, which can only consist of up to 8 creative professionals at a time, will also receive a Kindle Touch as part of the participation and we will read three assigned books together throughout the year.
Here is the course outline and the topics:
January 2012 - The Importance of Profit
February 2012 - Managing Your Trade vs. Working in Your Trade
March 2012 - Value Pricing in a Commodity World
April 2012 - Discussion on the book, Start with Why by Simon Sinek
May 2012 - Strategic Client Selection
June 2012 - The Strategy Behind ‘No Paper’
July 2012 - Branding and Visioning: The Requirements to Narrow Positioning
August 2012 - Discussion on the book, Positioning for Professionals by Tim Williams
September 2012 - Knowledge Management
October 2012 - The Big Goal Behind Process Design
November 2012 - Building Value Into Your Firm Through Process
December 2012 - Discussion on the book, The Innovator’s DNA by Jeff Dyer
*courses, topics and times subject to change.
If you are interested in the course, sign up below, and we’ll be in touch. Here’s to strategy (finally!) in the new year!!
Have you heard of ROWE? My guess is that our creative customers are already implementing a ROWE, whether they know what it is or not. ROWE stands for Results-only Work Environment, and if you want happy team members and innovation, it’s the only way to go.
ROWE essentially means that people in your company are evaluated on the results they actually produce, not on when or where they work. ROWE is more than flex time. ROWE means that your team members come and go as they please. They won’t need to ask you if they can leave early to go to a doctor’s appointment. They’ll just do it, and you won’t care because you TRUST them to do what they have agreed to do in your organization. In fact, they may not even come in that day at all. Attendance is not key. Results are!
The benefits of a ROWE are tremendous for the employee obviously, but the business owner will be rewarded too. You’ll be rewarded with talented people that want to work with you. Why would smart people choose to work in an environment where they are forced to stay there 40 hours a week, whether they need to or not? When your people know they are trusted to do their work and they have the freedom to do it when it is best for them, they will work efficiently and effectively. They won’t be killing time until 5 o’clock. They will work like crazy when a deadline is approaching, and they will relax at home (or wherever!) when the work slacks off.
I realize that ROWE may not look the same for every business. I have been describing a typical office scenario. If you are a dentist or run a retail business, you of course will need to staff your office to take care of your customers. But the mindset will be the same. With ROWE, you will care more about the results than the clock.
There is so much more to ROWE. And we’ll explain what it looks like at Blumer CPAs in a future post as well as explain what it means to you, our awesome customers. In the meantime, check out the ROWE blog. It’s full of good info to help you figure out what ROWE might look like in your business. Do you ROWE? Let us know!
We’ll keep this nice and short since we covered this topic recently. But a seriously stupid thing that many business owners do is not fire the crappy clients. Have you ever noticed that great customers refer other great customers? Guess who the leaches (the ones that suck the life right out of you and your team) refer to you? Yep…more leaches. Dump the dead weight before all you’re doing is running a leach farm.
Is your business a good idea? Successful entrepreneurs start businesses that solve a problem currently unmet in the market place. If you have a “brilliant” idea that doesn’t do anyone any good, then your idea is, frankly, a bad idea. No one is going to pay you a dime for something that offers them no relief.
Assignment: Ask yourself the hard questions. Or better yet, ask your spouse, your coach, or someone else that cares enough to tell you the truth:
1. Will anyone want what I am selling?
2. Are there already 500 other karate teachers in my city?
3. Are people interested in my idea when I talk about it or are they just smiling politely and hoping I’ll shut up soon?
Jason Blumer and Greg Kyte are back with the 4th edition of their business podcast, the THRIVEcast. The THRIVEcast has been called “The Wayne’s World of business podcasts.” You can find it on iTunes by searching for “THRIVEal” or by visiting the THRIVEal +CPA Network’s website. We hope you enjoy it!
We are a digital firm. We shy away from any use of paper and love all forms of digital files and communications. We have found that there is strategy deeply embedded in moving to the cloud, moving away from the use of paper in our business processes and heralding digital interactions with our customers. Now you know. If you want to reach us, we’re better over Twitter, Facebook, Email or Skype. We don’t do the phone. At least, not that often.
Strategy is all about doing things on purpose. It’s about being intentional. If you step outside of your business and look in from the view point of a third party, you will see how you may have done things over time withOUT intention.
Where there is no intention, there is no strategy. Have you been intentional in your business? Answer these questions…
1. Are you doing what you thought you would be doing?
2. Are you doing what you want to be doing?
3. Are you managing chaos into order?
4. Is your business running away with you?
5. Do you control how your customers deal with you, or the other way around?
6. Do you enjoy your work?
7. CAN you enjoy your work?
8. Would you do things differently if you started your business now?
9. What one thing do you need to stop doing right now?
10. What one thing do you need to start doing right now?
Two and a half years ago I wrote a blog post called “Why I Fire My Clients.” At the time, it received a number of hits and still remains one of our most popular posts. A lot has changed in the time since that post was written, but we continue to be selective in who (whom?) we choose to serve. We have learned that bringing the right customer into the firm means we don’t have to part ways later, which is why we slow down for onboarding. Nice. Still, occasionally we have to end a customer relationship for the good of all involved.
So why do I fire my customers? There are a number of reasons not to work with certain people, but one way to guarantee that you’ll need a new CPA firm is to be unkind to our team. Simon Sinek said, “Treat your employees like family, and they will treat your customers like guests.” My team comes first around here. They work hard for me and for our customers. They are creative, brilliant, and caring people. I wish I could double their compensation and give them all a company car. But I can’t. What I can do is make sure they spend their days serving customers that value them and what they do. I can ensure that they will be treated with respect, even when they aren’t perfect. Fortunately, we have the greatest customers in the world, so it rarely happens, but I can think of two who were fired this year after being rude to my team. Life is too short for that nonsense. I wouldn’t let my kids be bullied, and I won’t let my team be bullied either.
So who is the right customer? Who gets to stay? We will not fire the customer that understands our value. We desire to work with those who appreciate us and treat us kindly. We want to work with people that are willing to partner with us and be coached as they grow their businesses. If you already know everything, we aren’t right for you. We also aren’t right for bargain hunters or people that want us one year but not the next. We desire relationships with our customers.
As I said in my post in 2009, dumping the dead weight frees us to do great work for those we love to serve.
Hear me good customers: We love to serve you, and we are willing to do all things necessary to continue providing the best service to you. Hear me bad customers: your days are numbered (and the number is very small).
There is such strategy to eliminating paper in your business. At the Blumer firm, we strive to rid paper from our customer’s lives. Often times, we find human capital being used to cart paper through the business processes. By that I mean, people hire other people to get paper from the mail box, bring it in to the business, take it to a guy named ‘john’ then take it to a girl named ‘judy’ then print a piece of paper called a ‘check’ then stuff the check in an envelope and then walk that paper to the mailbox. Then the mailman (let’s call him ‘louis’) comes and carries it to his truck and drives that little dumb check across the country to deliver it to the person you want to have it.
People - this should not be! Paper has never loved us - we need to stop loving paper. It doesn’t need us to carry it around everywhere and treat it like it is so important.
Paper used to be part of delivering information. Now we can do that digitally and make your life simpler, less stressful and easier to manage. Interested? We can help at the Blumer firm.
Do you have your customer portal with us yet? Do you know what a portal is? First of all, thanks to those of you who have jumped on the portal bandwagon with us. We’ve been using SmartVault for our secure online customer portals for well over a year now with great success.
For those of you who need an explanation, portals are basically a secure online filing cabinet between us and you. No one else has the key to this filing cabinet but the CPA firm and the customer. We can deliver documents to you, and you can deliver documents to us. And we can do this from our desks or even our smartphones! Portals are secure, free, easy to set up, convenient, and always available. We are in portal heaven over here, so much so that Jason interviewed Eric Pulaski, the CEO of SmartVault for his recent THRIVEcast (a podcast Jason hosts for his CPA network, THRIVEal). You can listen to that here.
The benefits of portals:
1. Portals are easy to set up. Just email Jennifer to get started. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) She will set up your portal, and SmartVault will send you an email with a link to access your portal. You’ll create your own username and password, and then you’ll be uploading documents by the end of the day. It’s so easy! And we are here to help if you hit a bump in the road.
2. Portals are safe. You can read more about SmartVault’s bank level security features here. We will never email you a tax return or anything else that contains sensitive data. (In some states, there are regulations that prevent CPAs from using email to deliver financial data without proper encryption.) We care about our customers and we want to protect you! With portals, we don’t have to worry about accidentally hitting the “reply all” button or making some other stupid email error. Also, only you know your individual username and password.
3. Portals are available 24/7. You don’t have to wait until we are in the office to access a copy of your tax return or other pertinent data as long as it has been uploaded to your portal. You can also upload documents to your portal any time of day instead of having to deliver items to us during your busy work day. It’s the filing cabinet that is always with you as long as you have internet access.
4. Portals are convenient. We know it’s a pain to gather every little tax document you receive in the mail and then to mail them or hand deliver those to us during tax season. With a portal and a scanner (we recommend ScanSnap scanners by Fujitsu, you can easily scan each piece as it comes in and just let us know when it’s all there. Or save it all and scan it all in as one PDF. Either way is fine with us! (Read Jason’s article I Dream of Digital.)
And once a document is in your portal, it’s ALWAYS there. Next time you need a copy of your W2 from 2 years ago, you’ll know exactly where to find it. You’ll save time at the end of the tax process as well when we deliver your tax return to you in your portal! (We want you to come see us because you WANT to, not because you HAVE to!)
5. Portals won’t cost you a dime. This is a free service to all clients of Blumer & Associates, CPAs. We are committed to going green with our clients and eliminating the paper habit. (Eventually, we will no longer accept paper from our clients, and we will no longer deliver paper. We definitely recommend getting on board with us now so that you won’t be left behind later!)
Any questions? Email Jennifer at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or give her a call at 864-322-6858, extension 102 to set one up!
Is the word ‘Innovation’ over used? Perhaps. Maybe we’ll come up with another word to replace it. But for now, I believe the word conjures up thoughts of doing new things with new ideas. The word embodies the very action of creating from nothing.
Innovators don’t look around and compare.
Innovators don’t benchmark.
Innovators don’t ask what you want.
Innovators don’t follow.
Innovators are leaders that dream what can be from what has not been known. They perceive a future with no thought to the constraints that they currently live under. Innovators open their minds to build what you want that you didn’t even know you could have because it didn’t even exist yet. You don’t know that you want what innovators are creating. You can’t want what does not yet exist.
I’m glad Steve Jobs didn’t ask us what we wanted. Steve Jobs was an Innovator.
Through our years of serving people, we have discovered that the manner by which they enter our firm sets the tone for the rest of our professional relationship. Sounds pretty important, doesn’t it? It is! You’ll find that we s-l-o-w d-o-w-n when we decide to bring you into our firm as a new customer.
There are many technical pieces to get into place, our team must coordinate to serve you, and we often have to contact government agencies to get things rolling. Proper entry into our firm takes time. There is no way around it.
We call all the steps taken to bring you into our firm our Onboarding Process. In effect, we are trying to get you on our boat the right way. We have assigned one team member, Melinda, to perform our onboarding for us. That is Melinda’s only task with our firm. She is very focused for a week or two on getting you set up properly and giving our technical team their marching orders. Then Melinda steps out of the way and lets the technical team take over in serving you.
Our New Customer Onboarder, Melinda Guillemette
You’ll find our onboarding process may be slower than other firms upfront. However, the time we take in getting off on the right foot will save you and us hours of time in correcting errors made in haste later. We truly are laser focused on this time of onboarding. So many things could go wrong, and we want to handle you with kid gloves. You are worth it!
So we ask for your patience. Bear with us as we slow down…ultimately for your best. We love to serve you WELL!
Just a gentle reminder that if your tax return was extended back in April, it is due on October 17th. If you want to be sure that we’ll be able to get your return completed before the deadline, we must have your information no later that September 30th! Email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with tax questions!
It’s true. We are not the right firm for some people. It doesn’t mean we are bad at what we do, or that other people are wrong. It just means that we are different. That’s all. We believe in the way we have chosen to serve our clients, but we understand that our methods and processes will not be the right fit for everyone.
So we will take our time to try to figure that out before we enter into a relationship. The hard feelings and business separation that are necessary when we have to fire a customer is something we strive to avoid. Breaking up really is hard to do!
We think that ultimately you will benefit from our being selective in who we choose to serve. After all, we ARE the right fit for a lot of people! The best customers for us will see the value in our advice and our ability to use technology to radically change their business processes. They will also value our internal commitment to our team’s well being. (If Mama ain’t happy, no one is happy!)
We are experts at deploying cloud technologies to your life to make you more efficient and paperless. We love customers that listen to us while we give them all that we have to serve them with the most up to date technical knowledge we can find.
“If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability. “
Since we believe we can offer value to you, we see the price that you pay us as an investment that you make in your business and/or life. We think you will be better off if you pay us to help you push the envelope in your business, improve yourself, and innovate new ways of building your business.
We know a lot of things. And you want us to tell you those things. The knowledge we have can be invaluable to change the direction of your company or life and make you better long term.
Consider this: what do you know now that would have saved you countless hours of worry and a lot of money if you had known it earlier in your career or business? Don’t fail to make an investment in your business or life by overlooking the value we can bring you in “information known early.” We believe we can help you make more money!
Contact Jason to talk about our coaching, consulting, strategy, or design process meetings. It’s an investment worth making.
Welcome to part 2 in the What We Believe series. You can read the intro to this series here.
We Are Valuable
Unlike many professional firms, we don’t track our time when we work with you. We believe that billing you simply based on how long we spent on your work doesn’t make any sense. What if we are lazy and it takes us twice as long as the next guy to finish a tax return? What if we’re just super efficient because of our amazing internal processes? It’s just a flawed system. We believe you’d rather us do a GOOD job than a FAST job.
We like to be called Knowledge Workers. We want you, our customers, to recognize us for our innovative and thought-provoking value that we bring to you and your business. We sell our experience, our creativity, our ideas, our education, and our knowledge that has come from helping hundreds of other customers just like you.
And we don’t think you want to pay us by the hour. We believe you want us to offer REAL value, whether we spent 5 minutes on your work or completed a 10 month long project with you. We know you need results, not a time sheet.
We believe it is best to agree upon a price based on the mutual understanding of what the value is to each of us. And we believe that ideally this mutually agreed upon value will be determined up front, so that no one is shocked after the fact and so that you are not afraid of being nickeled and dimed if you need to contact us throughout the process of doing your work.
We are valuable.
*All new customers are brought into a relationship with our firm understanding that the pre-determined value will be paid over a twelve month period, drafted on the 1st day of the month. Contact Jason if you are ready to make this transition. If you are not already committed to our firm in this way, we expect to make this a policy for all business clients beginning in 2013.
We love serving creative customers and being around creative people. We believe in innovation and new ideas. That is why we are so excited to be a sponsor of the 2011 Indie Craft Parade, being held this weekend at Huguenot Mill in downtown Greenville, SC. We can’t wait to see and be inspired by all the creativity! A lot of hard work has gone into this event and you do NOT want to miss it! Check out all the details on the Indie Craft Parade website. Let us know if we’ll be seeing you there!
Ron Baker and Ed Kless are coming to Greenville, SC on October 28th and 29th to present the Firm of the Future Symposium! Normally this event would be around $2500 per person (and worth every penny). However, as a one year birthday gift to the THRIVEal +CPA Network, Ron and Ed are offering a special price of $850 per person. Ron and Ed have been preaching their message to the Accounting, Legal, Technology, Advertising, and Consulting professions for many years. Firms are being changed and Futures are being created right in this very event! This is the last Firm of the Future Symposium for 2011, so you won’t want to miss out!
In addition to the conference, Jason Blumer and Greg Kyte, hosts of the edgy new THRIVEcast, will be recording a LIVE podcast with audience participation on Friday evening at Zen Greenville. Guaranteed fun!
Thanks to our friends at Brains on Fire for the use of their space for the Symposium. It’s gonna be life changing!
It’s so important as business owners to know who we are and what we believe. Knowing what your core beliefs are will shape how you interact with your team, your customers, and how you run every aspect of your company. Beliefs impact your policies and processes. Our new customers are all given a document called “What We Believe” during the onboarding process. However, many of you have been with us for a long time and never been given that document. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing those beliefs here on our blog. As you read our beliefs, consider your own. Here’s a sneak peak at what’s to come in this series:
Our beliefs:
1. We are valuable.
2. Our fees are investments.
3. We are not for everyone.
4. Slow down for onboarding.
5. We are digital people.
6. We guarantee our work.
Being innovative is all about trying new things. Not just because it’s fun to try new things though. It’s all about trying something that will improve upon what you’ve already got going on. It’s about providing the best products and services you can for your customers, even if they are already happy.
Recently, we took a step to be accessible to our customers from anywhere. We said goodbye to our landlines and hello to Verizon iPhones for every member of our staff. We now have the ability to talk, text, email, fax, access our files, and make appointments from our phones! Sounds great, right? Well, it is. And we have enjoyed being able to knock out a couple of emails poolside or upload a file to a client portal from the dentist’s waiting room.
But with any new innovation, there is risk. And we ran into a little hiccup in our new phone system. We can’t transfer calls.
Uh oh.
We were not aware that this was an issue until we had signed on the dotted line. If you call our office, your call first goes to our administrative staff person. Hopefully she can answer your question. If not though, you’ll have to call back and use the extension of the person you want to reach. Not cool. It can be a frustrating experience. We get that.
Someone called our office recently and was angry that we had such an “amateurish” phone system. We know it’s not perfect. But we think the good has definitely outweighed the bad. And we’ll keep searching for a solution to the problem. This is not the last phone system we will ever have!
The big picture is this: we’ll keep trying new things. Some will work, and sadly, some won’t. But we will always be trying to improve! I think the guy that was so mad at us for even having that phone system just didn’t get it. He didn’t get innovative thinking because in his mind, there was no room for error. And that’s just not how we operate. We are willing to goof up in order to eventually find the BEST way to meet our clients’ needs. And for the record, this guy was not even a client.
Now for some logistics:
It is best to communicate with us digitally, but sometimes a phone call is in order. Here is who to contact, and how, for the best service from Blumer CPAs.
Call 1-864-322-6858 or toll free, 1-877-322-9939
Jason: Contact for consulting, coaching, and business process help
Chief Innovation Officer, and Prez: (Ext. 101) .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Cathy: Contact for all tax related matters
Tax Manager: (Ext. 103) .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Stephanie: Contact for cloud systems support and financial reporting issues
Financial Reporting Manager: (Ext. 105) .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Lisa: Contact for all payroll issues
Payroll Administrator: (Ext. 104) .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Emily: General accounting, payroll, and cloud support questions
Staff Accountant: (Ext. 106) .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Jennifer: Contact to direct you to the right person, scheduling appointments, help with client portals, and other general administrative questions
Administrative Assistant: (Ext. 102) .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Hot dang, I agree with him here. Innovation is essential to growth. More recently, however, he seems to be blaming innovation for our economic woes. “There’s some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers.” He cited bank ATMs and kiosks at airports for being job-stealers. He is getting slammed for that now!
Really?
Would you want to bank where you have to go inside just to make a $20 withdrawal? Do you want to buy gas where you can’t just pay at the pump? Do my clients from other states want to go to the post office to mail their W-2 to me at tax time instead of just uploading it to their secure portal?
I think maybe our president needs to remember a few things about innovation, technology, and efficiency before he gets too upset about those ATMs and airline kiosks.
• Businesses MUST meet the needs of their customers or risk losing them. Providing kiosks, ATMs, client portals, etc. attracts more customers and helps businesses grow. Our firm has become so efficient that we’ve attracted more clients and have had to hire a new person in the last week. Did you catch that? Being efficient has led us to HIRE an employee, not let one go!
• Innovation and technology may squeeze out some jobs, but they make room for new ones. As our knowledge economy grows, new jobs come on the scene that did not exist 10 years ago, and innovation promises more to come.
• It was innovation that led to pretty much everything we do here in America now… like turning on lights and driving cars. I guess the candle makers didn’t appreciate electric lights and the guy that sold horse shoes might not have been a fan of Henry Ford, but their job changed just like yours will change.
Please don’t stop being innovative. Don’t accept that something is right just because it’s always been done a certain way. Don’t stop THINKING! We don’t have to be robots that can’t have our own creative thoughts… though I’d like some innovative dude to build a robot that can wash and wax my car.
Are you thirsty? If you are, then feel free to get up and go get a nice glass of cold water. Doesn’t that just hit the spot? Water is so basic, so common, that most of us take it for granted. But there are people who don’t have this basic need met every day. Or if they do have water, it’s not easily acquired and sometimes not clean.
My wonderful husband (and boss!) is turning 40 in 40 days. Because he is such a great guy, he doesn’t want a gift from you to mark this milestone birthday. Or even a card. What he would LOVE though, is to know that 200 people will have clean water to drink. To achieve this, Jason is humbly asking his friends and family to donate a little spare change (or a lot, if you have it to spare) to mycharity:water for the development of clean water projects around the globe. Our goal is to raise $4,000 by Jason’s 40th birthday on June 16th.
To help us reach our goal, or to learn more about Jason’s 40th Birthday Water Campaign, you can visit this website or watch the video by clicking above. Thanks for helping us! I happen to think the world was made a little better place on June 16, 1971 when Jason was born, and I’m thankful that his friends, family, clients, and colleagues are going to make it even better through this campaign!
It’s good news that the House and Senate both passed H.R. 4 that repeals the 1099 reporting requirement that was passed in the Obamacare bill last year. This was a weird provision added to the bill to help “pay” for the cost of healthcare for everyone. It was unrelated to the health care bill (called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) and was just a grab for cash.
- Beginning January 1, 2012, every small business was going to have to send 1099s to everyone they paid over $600. This would be for services or goods, so if you buy more than $600 in supplies from Wal-Mart, then you would have to send them a 1099.
- Also, beginning after December 31, 2010, rental property owners were going to have to send 1099s to any service provider (roofers, plumbers, etc.) that they paid over $600 in one year.
Both of the provisions above will go away once Obama signs H.R. 4 into law. He is expected to do so. Hot dang!
One the specialties of our firm is helping our clients to digitize their world, go paperless and redesign their business processes around operating in the cloud. It’s often a bumpy road to get there, but the results are pretty cool. Our clients become more efficient, are able to scale in size (often without new staff) and enjoy the benefits of being able to operate their company from anywhere in the world.
But it takes some retooling of processes, staff and cloud-based software. And that is what we do well. I spend hours each week involved in what I call “Cloud R & D.” I read a lot about the cloud and I’m always researching new tools we could use in our own firm and for our clients. It’s what sets our firm apart.
Cloud R & D is pretty exciting to me because I love all of the new developments I read about and how I can deploy these new efficient tools to my client’s businesses. Some cloud products I like, some I don’t.
I’m convinced that you must do Cloud R & D in your firm or business so you can stay out in front of your competition. Moving your processes to the cloud is going to make you more efficient, more agile and ultimately more competitive. You have to know what is being built and how to use it.
I have a number of sites where I get my info, and I ain’t tellin’. I would have to kill you, and the sight of blood grosses me out.
There is a lot of talk about how broke the states are around the US. And South Carolina is no different. South Carolina passed a law back in June of 2010 to raise the amount of wages which are taxed for SC unemployment purposes. As far back as I can remember, all wages earned in SC up to $7,000 were taxed to employers for unemployment purposes.
But beginning January 1, 2011, that wage base went up to $10,000. That means all wages earned in SC are now taxed up to $10,000 for each employee. And this is an expense that employers have to carry. This will not affect the employees’ paychecks.
And it’s going up more each year:
Wage base in 2010: $7,000
Wage base in 2011: $10,000
Wage base in 2012: $12,000 (will remain here for a few years)
Wage base in 2015: $14,000
So beware: your first quarter’s unemployment tax bill is going to be a doozy, since you don’t pay this unemployment tax bill until the end of the first quarter. Get ready for it (and save some cash)!
We’ve been working through some processes at our firm related to how we bring clients into the firm. In essence, we have slowed down the process of bringing clients into the firm… way down. It’s not an attempt to tick the clients off (though it is often frustrating) but an attempt to let them know how committed to them we are. Through the process, there are multiple touches to the client and many options for questions to be answered. We call the process Client Onboarding.
And if necessary, there are opportunities for the potential client to decide NOT to work with our firm. If they don’t appreciate the value in time spent during process, then this will allow us to part ways without hurt feelings. We trust its a win-win.
But implementing new processes is typically not a smooth road. It is often bumpy because a great amount of change is involved. And when you involve a team of people that all have to coordinate simultaneously to make the process work, it gets tricky.
Why go through all of this? Because it has GREAT long-term value:
1. Our staff serves the client with greater coordination when the process is complete,
2. Our potential clients know we care about their relationship with our firm,
3. Because of the length of the process, we know more about the client when we begin to serve them,
4. We have more time to properly value our services to the client before beginning our work,
5. We can identify future services to use in service to our future clients.
What do you think? Do you see value in this? What am I missing?
Need an alternative to QuickBooks? Well, we’ve got good news for you. Accounting technology has taken leaps and bounds since you came out of diapers…
We support an innovative and collaborative accounting system called Xero.com. This system is enjoyable to use and looks beautiful.
But after getting back from New Zealand and their Xero Users Conference a few weeks ago, I’ve learned that their underlying accounting engine is truly a masterpiece. They’ve been building this thing for close to five years, and now it’s time for North America to know about it (though they are already in over 50 countries, and multi-currency has been available for some time).
They are constantly adding new partners that want to sync to their system making Xero.com even more robust. You can get:
-bank feeds
-inventory
-retail
-paperless components
-import/export of most data
-CRM sync
-time tracking
-ecommerce
-Paypal integration
-business intelligence reporting
-work flow
Hot dang, they are seriously working on a fix for our 1099 issue.
The Senate just passed a provision to repeal the onerous 1099 rule that all small businesses are scared of. If it passes the House, the Prez will probably sign it in to law. But lawmakers will have to make up the lost revenue that this 1099 nightmare would have brought in. What will they tax next? I’ve heard they’ll take oil companies, but still unsure.
We want our clients to go green with us! No paper, no more wasted gas, and no more wasted time. You can be virtual (whatever that means)! Play the video above and you’ll see what we mean.
Actually, being “virtual” is explained in the above video. We also explain how our firm is becoming virtual and what that actually means for our clients.
If you want to volunteer for the “Virtually+Green” program with Blumer CPAs, watch the video above and you will discover the magic (and endless joy for eternity)! Or, just go ahead and sign up now!!
Remember who determines your company’s value in the marketplace…
I had an interesting experience with my merchant company recently. And it highlights how the “marketing voice” of large corporations has moved from the company itself to the users of the services and products.
Intuit’s Innovative Merchant Solutions is my merchant company, mainly because they tie directly into their QuickBooks product. They recently held up some of my merchant deposits for almost a month and caused some problems for our company internally, our employees and our clients. They couldn’t say why and said they would research it. Not good.
But everyone makes mistakes, right?
So I called to remedy the situation. I got an employee who was unable to help me because he had obviously never been trained on how to deliver the brand of Intuit on the phone, and did not even have the power to resolve my issues in the first place. They blamed me for not checking my clients to see if they first had enough money to sufficiently allow me to draft their accounts. Well, that was the first thing I did. And when I told the representative this, he proceeded to tell me to “make sure you always check first that your clients have enough funds before you draft their accounts.” So he told me it was my fault again. Not good.
So I tweeted abut it and put it on Facebook to see if they would respond (because I’ve incurred over $200 in fees now because of their mistakes). The did not respond after thousands of people heard what they did. My voice dominated this conversation, and their voice was no where to be found. Not good. (and now I’m blogging about it - please RT!).
So at this point, I’ve decided to leave this “innovative” merchant for a more innovative solution (“innovation” in this scenario is not a very high bar to surmount, so anything will do). But then they sent me an automated survey. Oh goody - I rolled up my sleeves and got started. I filled it out and gave them good feedback, but was not mean-spirited. The last comments section was an open-ended question so I took my time to fill out that section to really help them in the future. I spent too long on the question and the browser timed out. Not good.
I was thinking of using Authorize.net because they sync with many cloud products, and someone also suggested Chargify. And now Daniel Hauer with North American Bancard contacted me over Facebook noting that I was having trouble with my merchant company. He is monitoring social media and he would love to help me out. (Daniel’s number is 248-876-4502 and his email is .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
Not sure who I’ll use yet.
Take aways:
1. Remember who determines your company’s value in the marketplace. It’s not you! It’s your clients and customers. They determine what your value is, and they determine if you are worthy to be used. Please don’t forget this.
2. Institute ways where “real” people can engage and communicate with users of your services and products. Don’t leave your voice out of what is being said concerning your company and brand. Big mistake.
3. Remember that our marketplace is getting younger and younger. And these new users of your products use social media, and they have real influence with their colleagues. I’ve tweeted about my experience, put it on Facebook and now I’m blogging about it. Will I hear from Innovative Merchant Solutions? Probably not.
We made a mistake with a client recently. It really stinks when we do that! But don’t be surprised - making mistakes is a part of the human life. You do it in your business too.
Anytime we make a mistake in the firm it becomes an opportunity to prove our integrity. We confess fully what we did, tell the full truth, and we let the consequences be what they may. Confessing mistakes can lead to the client leaving our firm (almost never happens), or proving to the client what we are really made of.
We could lie. There are a lot of technical compliance complexities to our industry, and we could lean on one of those to push the burden a little further away from our doorstep. But let’s compare the options of lying to our clients and telling them the full truth.
If we lie, the clients may not even know that we did anything wrong. They may be neutral about our firm, with no change in how they feel about us. We’ve basically gained nothing.
If we confess our mistake, the client has now learned two things (at least) about our firm: (1) we will tell them when we make a mistake, and (2) they trust us more after the mistake than they did before the mistake because of #1.
What do you think? Do you leverage your mistakes in other ways?
This is how I begin my bill pay process - within this system, all bills are paid timely, routed to the right person for approval, are filed paperlessly in an online filing cabinet and automatically dumped into my accounting system! Sweet.
Bill.com is the bomb, and we deploy this system to our clients to introduce workflow into their business and take them paperless. It’s creating real solutions for small businesses.
2. Grocery chains typically stock some 50,000 items for sale, but Trader Joe’s stocks about 4,000 well-chosen items in their stores. You don’t have to sell everything, and that means your business will not be suited for everyone - and that’s okay.
3. This is a place for foodies. It boasts some of the most unusual foods that can not be found anywhere. Their location is meant to be for those seeking the unusual and niched. Create a niche for your business.
4. Their product mix is on small inventory with high turnover. They buy less products and determine to sell those products with greater turnover. This allows them to buy in large quantities with deep discounts. Offering limited products with high profit potential allows for better service to the ultimate customer.
5. The highest R&D costs for Trader Joe’s is the travel budget for the inside buyers that search the globe for the best products available. When customers come to Trader Joe’s they know that the products on their shelves will be the best the world can offer. Be consistent in excellence, and customers keep coming back.
Any takeaways from the article? Leave it in the comments.
Our client, CoWork Greenville, LLC, has a bunch of creative clients and friends moving into their new space soon near downtown Greenville, SC. The office is going to be awesome, so if you are looking for a long-term or temporary space to be innovative and collaborative, check them out.
It’s time for a little education! To do that, we’ve set up some webinars you can join us online for over the next couple of months. We’re pretty excited about some of the announcements we’ll be making, and we hope you find value in them…
"Go to school!"
Remember, there are only 15 tickets per event, so please register early. If the webinar you want to attend is full, or you can’t make that date, email us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and we’ll consider additional events.
Check it:
Friday, November 12, 2010, 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm - New Paperless and Efficient Ways of Doing Business Online - Have you ever wondered if there is a better way to do business? You may not know it, but accounting technology has taken leaps and bounds over the past few years. We can now help our clients go paperless, develop workflow and do all of their business online no matter where you or your employees are located (...in the world). And we deploy these technologies for clients all over the world. For example, you can now scan bills or take pictures of your credit card receipts, and it all goes into QuickBooks - without you keying anything in! Truly amazing tools! Check it out and sign up by clicking on the title above to register.
Friday, December 3, 2010, 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm - Green Tax Credits and Corporate Sustainability - Everyone is going green now! Don’t leave the accounting world out. We also understand the world of green… and how to leverage the latest tax credits to help your bottom line. And corporate sustainability, or a business’ transformation of their operations to deliver the least impact on the environment, is also changing the face of how big business delivers their services. Check it out and sign up by clicking on the title above to register.
Friday, December 10, 2010, 2:00 pm to 2:30 pm - Virtually+Green with Blumer CPAs - We’re proud to announce our green movement going live January 1, 2011! As our firm becomes more and more virtual (something you may not have even known), we have created innovative ways to prepare and deliver your taxes to you in a green way. Our “virtually+green” movement will highlight 4 ways that our tax services can become green. As a client of the firm, we’ll invite you to participate in this movement, save gas, paper and money! Woo hoo. Check it out and sign up by clicking on the title above to register.
Thursday, December 16, 2010, 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm - A Review of Tax Changes from 2010 - The tax changes from 2010 have been a little overwhelming to say the least. So many changes have many clients and business owners wondering how these new laws can help (or hurt) them. This one-hour webinar will attempt to answer some of these questions. Check it out and sign up by clicking on the title above to register (don’t forget to chose the day you want to attend on the registration page).
Friday, December 17, 2010, 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm - A Review of Tax Changes from 2010 - same webinar as above, different day. Check it out and sign up by clicking on the title above to register (don’t forget to chose the day you want to attend on the registration page).
I must say that my network has been the one thing that has grown my business, put me in front of the right people and put me “in the right place at the right time” untold times. And expending your network should take different avenues that you may think.
Over time, your network becomes stale and in-bred, if not doused with new flavors. That is, eventually, you’ll meet just about everyone you need to meet if you remain in the same networking groups you’ve always visited. And if they are all focused on your industry, then all you’ll get is industry innovation (which sometimes stinks - especially if you hang out with a bunch of geeky CPAs).
Chris Brogan says diversify your network by Industry and Location.
Different industry contacts may expand your business into new markets that you may have overlooked had you not been hanging with some innovative folks in other vertical markets. In this instance, innovation in your industry may mean you approach customers with new solutions to their problems even if it’s not your primary business. You never know…
Developing different contacts in different geographical areas of the world is now totally doable, no matter what business you are in. You’ll probably have to accomplish this through social media. And establishing yourself through social media takes a few years (so you better get started, dang it). But the people you’ll meet will challenge your business models, will sharpen you and lead to potential new ventures and opportunities you didn’t even know you could pursue. This stuff is happening to me right now, and its exciting.
You stink! And your network is starting to smell. Go meet some new people (and don’t do it at the local Chamber of Commerce - those networks stink too). Explore the world of social media and meet your next business partner!
Let me have it in the comments if I’m off my rocker.
Trust Agents are people who have “established themselves as being non-sales oriented, non-high-pressure marketers. Instead, they are digital natives using the web to be genuine and to humanize their business. They’re interested in people (prospective customers, employees, colleagues, and more), and they have realized that these tools that enable more unique, robust communication also allow more business opportunities for everyone.”
from Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
(UPDATE: THE HOUSE PASSED THIS BILL LAST WEEK SO IT MOVES TO OBAMA’S DESK NOW FOR HIS SIGNATURE.)
The Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 recently passed the Senate with no problem. Now it goes to the House where it is also expected to pass with no problem. The intention of the bill is to allow small businesses to invest, avoid gains and have greater access to capital to grow their businesses. Here are some details of a few of the provisions of the bill:
1. Bigger credit carrybacks. Businesses with less than $50 million in sales can now carry back general business credits 5 years to past more profitable tax years. And what you can’t carry back (because you don’t have enough profit in the past 5 years to carry them back), you can carry them forward 20 years.
2. A change to the S Corp Holding Period. Before the bill, when a C Corporation converts to an S Corporation, any gains on the conversion of assets to this new corporate structure had to sit on your tax return for 10 years. If you didn’t sell the company, or any of the related assets, then you would NOT have to pay tax on this built-in gain. Another recent law changed that 10 year holding period to 7 years if the assets were sold in 2009 or 2010. But with the passage of this bill, the holding period of these assets is now only 5 years if that 5th year precedes the year 2011 (which kind of means its temporary).
3. Increase in Sect. 179 expensing. This is where a business buys large equipment and writes it all off in the year they buy the equipment (as long as you start using it in 2010 and you have profit in your business to write the equipment off against). With the passage of this bill, the Sect. 179 expensing has been raised from $250,000 to $500,000. Makes me want to go buy a $500k company car just so I can write it off!
4. Bonus depreciation is back! Related to #3, bonus depreciation allows a business owner to write off a certain portion of their new equipment purchase in 2010. The HIRE Act didn’t restore this provision from 2009, but now this bill will extend writing off 50% of your equipment purchases through the end of 2010.
5. Write off your family on your self-employed health insurance bill. This bill would allow a self-employed business owner to write off the cost of their family’s health insurance expense directly against their self-employed income. I think this is huge for self-employed folks!
6. Deduct your cell phone! There will be less strict rules for using and deducting your cell phone in your business if this bill passes the House.
7. The SBA (Small Business Administration) gets an overhaul. With the passage of this bill, a lot changes in the area of SBA lending. SBA loan fees will be reduced, more can be borrowed by small businesses and the guarantee level that the government is giving to these loans gets hiked up quite a bit (to a 90% guarantee level). Wow!
This was a fascinating book, and I believe is making a profound case for the right brain in today’s society. I’m a left-brained geek with serious right-brained leanings. I guess I’m a “wanna be” musician, artist or designer. In fact, this book really backed up what I find so intriguing about the CPA industry; we have such opportunity to be so creative and innovative in our industry, but often hide behind our left brains punching numbers into computers thinking we are changing the world.
No matter what your field of study, clients and customers want solutions to their problems. They may need you to be a geek, but they ultimately want you to make their lives better. And that means you must be creative enough to dive into their minds, feel what they are feeling and offer tangible comfort for their daily problems.
A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink, offers some guidance on how to do just that.
Abundance speaks to the amazing amount of things available to us in such amazing different ways. Like in no other time, the defining feature of our country is Abundance. We have too much and don’t use half of what we do have. Right-brain thinkers have brought about our desire for design in the untold swath of American consumerism. In fact, design is all we have to distinguish among the huge available bounty in these great United States. Where left-brainers are offering technical problem solutions, right-brainers are telling us why we even need it.
Asia is another force pushing the West into a right-brain focus. That’s because the left-brain work is headed East. The new young engineers of India, Philippines and China are now able to perform some of the most high-tech American jobs for the same wages earned by a Taco Bell counter employee in America. Outsourcing, though controversial, is here to stay. Huge conglomerate companies such as GE now have 48% of their computer programming outsourced to Asian engineers (as cited in the book). This changes how we view life as our jobs are going away. What will we do? We will change, just like we have at every major shift in our country’s history. And we will use more of our right brains in the process.
Automation is the third huge phenomenon mentioned by Pink in describing our nation’s shift towards right-brained thinking. Computers and the rise of technology are driving our routines into the hands of computers. According to Pink, any job that is ultimately based upon routines and is performed with a sequence of steps is at risk for automation. Innovative companies are actually creating programs that can write their own code, further jeopardizing the thought processes of the left-brain.
To survive these changes, we will ultimately be forced to change along with our society’s push towards outsourced left-brain activities. Pink goes on to state the six aptitudes that we must master to survive in this move towards a right-brained era:
1. Not just function, but Design, or creating products and services that offer amazing design allowing your product to stand out among the great swaths of abundance,
2. Not just argument, but Story, or fashioning a compelling narrative allowing our brains to retain meaning longer and with greater impact,
3. Not just focus, but Symphony, or putting pieces together to create the larger reality,
4. Not just logic, but Empathy, or those that can develop the relationship and caring behind our world’s view of information processing,
5. Not just seriousness, but Play, or the underlying need for all of us to enjoy our work and life,
6. Not just accumulation, but Meaning, or obtaining what we need not for the sole reason to obtain, but to understand and properly use what we have to further develop the meaning behind our lives.
The rest of Pink’s book dives into how to understand these six senses, along with portfolio sections of the book focused on practical ways to help you develop your new six senses.
If you’ve read the book, let me know what you thought about it, whether good or bad.
I had a client do a smart thing recently. He has paid his first two quarterly estimates but wondered if his business situation warranted him paying his remaining two estimates. To know this, he compared his current business income and expense situation to the prior year.
He properly assessed which parts of his business were different this year than they were last year and came to the conclusion that he probably didn’t need to pay in his last two estimates.
I reviewed his situation and I agreed after a couple of clarifying questions.
Just because your CPA gives you four quarterly tax estimates to make, doesn’t mean your situation won’t change and that you may not need to make all of your estimates before the year is up. ‘Tis the season for fall tax planning. Are you game?
There are many ways to track your personal finances. As usual, our firm leans toward putting your money management online because of the convenience and ease of use of such products.
Intuit's Quicken
Some will use a desktop software, like Intuit’s Quicken, but moving your info online makes it accessible anywhere, doesn’t tie you to a particular computer while keeping your information safe from remembering to backup your info all the time (backups happen automagically when you are in the cloud!).
I just received a notice from Intuit that they will be discontinuing their online Quicken product and replacing it with Mint.com.
Mint.com is quickly becoming the leader in online personal financial management. It’s interface is simply beautiful and easy to use. It pulls in tons of bank feeds so you don’t have to key in your data manually, and you can access it on your iPhone! Sweet! The budget features and new goals feature are also cool reasons to migrate to Mint.com. Though it’s free to use, some criticize that your online information is really a huge database for marketers (and in fact, they do have a whole section of the site dedicated to selling new products to you). But it’s hard to beat free.
Xero.com, an award-winning business accounting software we support online, also has a pretty robust online personal financial management side called Xero Personal. Their help center is top notch and they are releasing new updates as quick as user comments can populate their blog posts. They are a company that listens and they will quickly become a large player in the market place. And with Wesabe’s recent announcement that they will discontinue their service (they are another online financial community and money management site), Xero has come to their rescue to allow Wesabe imports directly into Xero Personal. Xero Personal doesn’t yet allow for bank feeds to be brought into their software automagically, but it won’t be long. They are a long term player in this market, and it’s only $34 per year!
I don’t know much about Mvelopes, but have heard good things. They also allow for bank feeds and credit card imports into your account (which can be viewed on your mobile phone too). One cool thing about this program is they have a full blown bill pay service built right in. So if you pay your bills online through you bank, now you can do it in the same place you track your money. Mvelopes uses the popular feature of putting your paychecks into envelopes that fill up as you get paid. You see the envelopes getting bigger, and they even take some money out of your envelope as you use your credit card - as they take money out of your “clothing” envelope, they put it in a “for credit card payment” envelope so you can pay off your credit card in full when the bill comes at the end of the month. I couldn’t find out how much the service actually costs, but it looks pretty cool.
Which system do you use? (and don’t say nothing).
Here are the results so far for WebCPA’s poll question “Should the Bush Tax Cuts be Extended?”
If you don’t extend them, then it will effectually be a tax hike (a big one). But if you do extend them, that will just take us into an era where tax hikes are going to be required to pay for the debt the current administration has created (or added to). Some say taxes are extremely low now, and that this tax hike is necessary.
A client sent me a great article on how to build referrals in your business. It got me thinking about some other recent stuff I’ve read on building referrals.
Here are some of my take-aways:
1. Asking for referrals is one of the greatest ways to build business, but we never do it. If you consistently serve your clients well, then they would probably be happy to send you referrals. They’re just busy (like you) and don’t think about it. Ask!
2. Ask for referrals right after you’ve delivered a superior service or product. Start it this way, “If I was able to add value to you, do you think there is anyone you know that I could help as well?”
3. Setup a process to ask for referrals. Our firm’s marketing person (my wife) has helped me do this in our firm. We have made a list of the top clients that we do a lot of work for, and have strategically put them on my calendar throughout the year to call and ask for a referral. If we didn’t have a process, I would have forgotten. But its working.
4. Tell your referral sources about what you do, and who would make a good client. I often meet with potential contacts just to see what they need and what type of client they are looking for. Likewise, they ask me what type of client I am looking for. We often think of clients that could mutually benefit each other right in our meeting. Very helpful.
5. Meet a lot of new people. This takes a lot of time, but anytime I travel, I’m always looking to meet new people in the city I’m traveling to. Never waste that opportunity to simply make an acquaintance with other people. You never know, maybe the barista’s brother-in-law just told him about a friend’s mother that needs your services. Building your business ALWAYS means building relationships – you never know where it will lead.
6. Now it’s your turn – please let me know how you build referrals… (leave it in the comments above)
Small is the new big. This trend has been noted some time ago by a study commissioned by Intuit. And I see the trend everywhere I look. I like what I see.
Here is what small is NOT:
1. Less profits. I don’t think being small means your profits have to be small. You must be wiser and more efficient when you chose to be small, but you don’t have to settle for smaller profits.
2. Less staff and people. Small can be a mind set and doesn’t have to actually look smaller to those around you. It may NOT mean that you have fewer people working for you. It could mean that, I just don’t think a smaller staff is a requirement for small.
3. Less expertise and notoriety. Just because you are small doesn’t mean you have to be the “unknown provider.” You can be well known, you just get to decide what you do with your well-known expertise and notoriety.
4. Less global reach. On the contrary, small businesses are some of the most well positioned companies to take their concepts to an international market. This evidence is all around us. Small can be global.
Here is what small IS:
1. Slower growth. I believe small is choosing to grow slower. When you do this, you innately learn what you are doing. You figure out what you are doing quicker, and you screw up your business plans less often (at least that is what I think I would have done over the past 7 years had I chosen small).
2. Strategic. Growing slower means you are growing smarter.
3. Artisan. Choosing small means you are choosing to be a specialist who can be known as an artisan in your field. Here is a great video explaining the concept of artisan. Artisans hand craft things with care, and are reachable by their customers and clients. They have a lot of face time with their people, and are known by their people.
4. New business models. Your employees can work for you all over the world now. Business models are becoming flatter, meaning hierarchy and large management structures are not as needed. They often create difficult ways to get real business done. You can chose a brand new business model for your industry and still remain small.
These are my thoughts. Am I off my rocker? What do you think? Leave it in the comments above.
I listened to a podcast recently on the debt of various countries, and how its growing. Those countries with significant consumer debt as compared to their GDP (or the measure of their country’s output) are falling or hurting very severely. The US isn’t as bad as some of the worst countries, but our debt is growing at a pretty rapid pace.
Image by miss_rogue via Flickr
The podcast mentioned two reasons consumers and companies incur debt:
1. If their desired spending exceeds their desired income. Stupid. Listen to some Dave Ramsey rants to figure out you need to lower your “desired spending” below your current income.
2. If they believe they can use the borrowed money to invest in a higher future return. This was a practice started in the 70s (according to the podcast), and typically worked out well. Taking on debt now, and investing it in a good business idea returned a pretty good return as your business grew.
But that was then…
1. Debt is NOT as good an investment as it used to be. I don’t believe #2 above is true anymore. Our economy changed a couple of years ago (if you didn’t notice), and I don’t believe we are going to be what we were before the downturn. Though our economy has shown some signs of a rebound, I believe they are subsidized signs by our government pumping money into people buying new homes and hiring new workers. It’s not real yet. And I believe it’s going to take some time to truly rebound. So I definitely would NOT invest in debt now and expect a good return within 5 years. It’s not a safe bet.
2. Pay off your debt. If you have to grow slower, then do it to pay off your debt. In 5 years you will be the wiser consumer if you make changes now to solidify your cash position. And if there is going to be another downturn in the future (and there almost certainly will be) then you will be in a cash position to benefit from everyone else that is leveraged to the hilt. I have some debt too and I have given the next 5 years to get this paid off to be more agile and stronger in the future. I know that investment (i.e., paying off debt) is the best investment I can make now.
One stupid thing you may be doing as a business owner is wasting time reading People magazine instead of Inc. magazine. Fame and celebrity is something created in our own minds and pushed by media. Following your favorite celeb is fine, but it isn’t likely to do you any good in your business unless that celebrity is your customer. 
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They don’t delegate the small stuff.
We’ll keep this nice and short since we covered this topic recently. But a seriously stupid thing that many business owners do is not 
For those of you who need an explanation, portals are basically a secure online filing cabinet between us and you. No one else has the key to this filing cabinet but the CPA firm and the customer. We can deliver documents to you, and you can deliver documents to us. And we can do this from our desks or even our smartphones! Portals are secure, free, easy to set up, convenient, and always available. We are in portal heaven over here, so much so that Jason interviewed 
This is Part 3 in our What We Believe series. Read 
Unlike many professional firms, we don’t track our time when we work with you. We believe that billing you simply based on how long we spent on your work doesn’t make any sense. What if we are lazy and it takes us twice as long as the next guy to finish a tax return? What if we’re just super efficient because of our amazing internal processes? It’s just a flawed system. We believe you’d rather us do a GOOD job than a FAST job.
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