A lot goes into developing a business strategy for these firms. The work needs to be guided by four fundamental principles: 1. The elements of the strategy need to be the right things to make the firm more successful. — This means taking into account the firm’s clients and target clients as well as…
As midsize regional accounting & advisory firms expand to serve more client industries, they struggle to identify leaders for these new areas. In fact, expansion aside, they may not have enough strong leaders for their existing portfolio of industries. For this reason, it’s important to cluster industries to match a firm’s leadership bandwidth. The…
For staff in accounting & advisory firms, what does best places to work mean? Here’s a list of some common criteria: • Work/life balance • Not a sweat shop • Strong training programs • Great benefits • Fair compensation • Trusting the people you work for • Caring…
It’s time for law firms to reconsider their basic operating model. The long-standing assumption of large and mid-size law firms has been that recruiting the top academic graduates from prestigious law schools is the way to build the strongest firms. Similarly, use of an up-or-out partnership model, which has served firms well for a…
In working on strategic planning for accounting & advisory firms, a key issue is always: moving forward, in which client industries should the firm invest? A quick glance at firms’ websites reveals that most firms are already largely organized by industry — sometimes exclusively. However, these organizational alignments were developed based on firms’ historical…
Because of their unique characteristics, nonprofits can require some added leadership development focus before new strategic plans are developed. Often, these organizations are founded by passionate individuals who, over time, may not make the best strategic leaders of their organizations. Or, organizations may bring in “rock star” leaders who can command attention and raise money…
Strategic planning is especially important in the nonprofit world. These organizations have similar risks and opportunities as commercial businesses, but they often don’t have the competitive market to keep them “honest”. Or, put a little better, by the time they realize they are in trouble, it is often too late. A few years ago, we…
In our strategy work with regional accounting and advisory firms, one of the thorniest issues is how to migrate the firm’s partners to service line specialties. To partners who have been doing both audit and tax work for their entire careers, the thought of changing now as part of a strategic planning process can be…
We regularly assess leadership succession candidates and outside applicants against desired behaviors for a role, determined by using the Bizet Job Activity Rating online job profiling instrument. When we do this, the behaviors where the candidates show weakness are given a lot of scrutiny. Recently, a client executive whose role was going to be open…
Last week, we tested a new concept. We gave a half-day workshop to 12 CEOs and their senior staff members that focused on using increased awareness of self and others to develop understandable messaging for their business strategies. We developed the workshop in response to the CEOs’ consensus that their greatest challenge is not developing…