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Last week I wrote about identifying the most major thing you could change that could have the biggest impact on your practice growing and becoming stronger. A few readers asked me for an example. My one major suggested change, unfortunately, is still the major change for many firms. Rather than provide many suggestions, I want to tell you how my partners and I decided on our one major change way back and the impact it had. Unfortunately I realize this is still a major impediment for many firms’ growth.
Around 1980, I was partners with Sy Siegel and Paul Rich, and then in July 1988 I became partners with Peter Weitsen and later Frank Boutillette. When I was with Sy and Paul, we had other two senior staff as part of our management team. My partners and I in both practices resolved to grow into a major business. I was a constant but there were six others involved in this process, so it was far from a one-person show. We spent many hours on this. In fact, we rented a hotel room for daylong meetings. This was done in both practices. We took it very seriously.
We worked hard at this and identified the single most important thing that would hold back our growth. It was getting adequate staff. It wasn’t getting more business, growing a niche, adding technical services, having better processes, growing our IT capabilities or infrastructure or how well we spent our time. It was getting adequate staff.
Let me define adequate staff. This was staff who were technically competent, bought into our culture, worked well as a team, wanted to grow professionally with us, were eager to learn and be trained, really enjoyed what they did, and liked the clients.
A problem we had was that we were growing rapidly, needed to bring on staff quickly and were having trouble finding experienced staff who fit in with us. Also, turnover was diverting attention from running the practice, causing us to spend too much time trying to get replacements who had the right experience. What was holding us back was the ability to get the right staff people.
I will not belabor you with the details of how we arrived at our solution, but we dispensed with looking for experienced people and decided to grow our own, primarily by hiring graduating accounting majors and training them. This was not an easy decision and proved costly in many ways, but we made a decision that this was the best way. It was in some manner a default decision because nothing else worked. We also added up a lot of numbers, and it wasn’t really more costly than what we were doing that wasn’t working; it was just different. Anyway the results were extremely successful and mimicked what mostly all of the larger firms did and still do.
That made a big difference in our lives. Neither of my two firms grew into the powerhouses I might have dreamed about, but we were always happy and had fun, had very low turnover with really nice people working with us who made a very good living.
One point to mention is that a 1981 article about our firm in The Wall Street Journal described how getting adequate staff was the No. 1 problem holding us back. It stopped being our major problem a long time ago, but I see this today as still the top problem holding back many smaller practices. I’ve posted a lot of columns here on how to deal with this. I know many firms take my suggestions to heart and have been very successful with it.
However, I am not using this as what your No. 1 major change should be, but as an illustration of what I mean by a No. 1 major change and some ways to identify it.
Figure yours out, and then work on removing it from the top of your list to one of the continuously routine practice management processes you do regularly.
By the way, as “proof” that hiring out of school works, on July 1, 2023, Withum will be promoting 19 staff to partnership, including eight who started their careers with Withum or its predecessor firm and one who joined after working somewhere else but who was with us for 17 years. The previous year, of the 16 who were promoted, six started with us.
Do not hesitate to contact me at emendlowitz@withum.com with your practice management questions or about engagements you might not be able to perform.
