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Great things can be accomplished by teams. And the best teams are made up of players who have unique roles that mesh and multiply their teammates.
What is the unique role of the CPA? The thing we bring to the table of business?
I propose that CPAs should own the “profit equation” – that it be our domain.
As a small business owner, you have one foot in the future and one foot in the the present: building your firm for the future, while serving the needs of the present. The difference between the two worlds is the gap: the space between where you are and where you’ll be. If you let that gap grow too big while your feet are straddling it…well, I think you get the picture. 😉
In some ways, that gap is what defines an entrepreneur. They see the difference between the world how it is and how it can be. It’s an internal cognitive dissonance, a type of itch, that they reach out to scratch.
What can happen nowadays, though, is that so much innovation comes at us, that the volume of cognitive dissonance grows too loud (anyone out there felt it?). There’s a difference between a music level that’s motivating, and a music level that’s inhibiting, or even downright crushing.
My first Thrivecast appearance was to chat with two great hosts and great friends, Jason Blumer and Greg Kyte, about the newly christened Thriveal Lab and our first experiment on business model prototyping for the accounting profession.
In addition to the genesis and operation of the Lab, we talked about the principles of experimenting, and why accountants can find it hard even though it’s so necessary.
You can listen to the audio right from the page for Episode 38, and definitely be sure to subscribe to the Thrivecast for lots of great information, inspiration, and fun. If you’re an entrepreneurial-minded accountant, the Thriveal CPA Network is also a great way to connect with your tribe and grow – I highly recommend it!
When I’m reading for content, I’m all about the marginalia: underlines, questions in the borders, even one sided handwritten debates with the author. Which is why I was much relieved that the Kindle allows you to digitally underline text and add notes too — you can even export them to a PDF to save and search, a way cool feature that I’ve taken advantage of many a time.
But what if the text in a book went from edge to edge? No spaces between the lines, no space on either side of the page, none at the top, none at the bottom: a page littered with letters. Hard to read, cramped with lines blurring, and eyes crossing…
Now imagine if that book is our firm’s story: tasks and activities wedged endtoend, no space inbetween, no real breaks, no room in the borders. When all the space is filled, there’s no place to make edit markings. When all our resources are committed, there’s no capacity for change. When the entire page is full, there’s no space to doodle in the margins.
Today I launched the inaugural experiment in the Thriveal Lab with the hypothesis that ‘there will be multiple successful business models for accounting firms of the future’. We discussed the premise and experiment framework, solicited experimental firms to participate, and thanked our founding Lab Partners for supporting the important work of the Lab.
Check out the original post for more!
What is the ‘phrase that will change your business’s future?’: “I’d like to try an experiment…let’s see if this works.”
In this post on the Thriveal blog, I announced the Self-Experiment Initiative of the Thriveal Lab — a structured way accounting firm owners could think through and design an experiment, and then record their results to a central repository to be shared with other experimenters.
Read more about the initiative and the surrounding tools and concepts in the original post.
There’s a balance line somewhere between having everything planned out and having no idea what’s going on.
And the ideal is not ‘having it all figured out.’ There’s no reason to feel bad or punish yourself for not being fully organized. Chaos is a natural part of the picture — you can’t pull order from chaos without a little chaos. Which is why it’s okay to deliberately mess things up now and then. Or as we say in Thriveal parlance: blow things up.
When asked the question, “What does your firm want to be when it grows up,” it’s okay to say, “I don’t know.” Discovery really best happens from the side rather than head-on. You really can’t plan “a-ha” moments, or else it’s not really a discovery. Discovery is, by nature, unexpected. All you can do is put yourself in different places or situations where it might occur and remain open to it happening, without compulsion. A little trust in Providence doesn’t hurt either.
Those of you tracking the Thriveal blog for a while may have noticed one of the themes I’ve been exploring over time through my posts is: where is the practice of accounting headed? Entries on that topic include: A Profession In Search of an Identity, The Firm(s) of the Future(s), Accounting Is Not the Language of Business, and the most recent: Accounting For What. In that post, I came right up to, but didn’t take, the last leap in the hopscotch of the thought process, which is what I’d like to share now: “The customer is the product.”
I first heard that phrase uttered by good friend and Verasage founder, Ron Baker, at a conference last fall and it caused me to do a full stop in my tracks. I realized I can be focused on what we’re selling, and changing our offerings, and marketing our products and services, and on and on. But the truth of the matter is, it’s the customer that’s the product. And what I do is best measured by how it changes their lives.
What we do is best measured by how it changes our customers’ lives.
Continue reading “The Customer is the Product”
It’s coming. But somehow it helps to know it’s coming.
There’s always the initial excitement, and the expansive vision of new possibilities. Then reality sets in.
The key is to recognize it’s part of the process: One does not reach the “plateau of productivity” without walking through the “trough of disillusionment.” The trough is where the idea is purified, distilled, crystallized — stripped of its misconceptions, to see what truly lays inside.
You do not reach the “plateau of productivity” without walking through the “trough of disillusionment.”
This is true of so many different scenarios.
On January 29 I hosted a “Bunsen Burner Chat” with accounting firm owners from different parts of the globe to talk about experimentation in the accounting industry as part of the Thriveal Lab.
See the original post for highlights from the online gathering plus updates on the Thriveal Lab’s activities.