Like a Ton of Bricks

While attending a continuing education class today, it hit me that a major reason why established firms fail to progress is the inability of the established leadership to relinquish control. It's not all about money, but the fear of losing status/prestige/control. If new people develop new business then they won't be needed the way they are now. I think this is what the established leaders fear more than the possibility of losing money and I think this is why they sometimes actively seek to remove people who threaten the status quo. These people have spent their lives convincing their peers, clients and themselves that they are so valuable that they are irreplaceable. This is why they won't retire and why they keep incompetent people around (even promoting them) and create conditions that make the exceptional people leave.

What Will It Take? Part 2

One of the absolute necessities to continue as a thriving profession is to keep the hard working and qualified people we have in the profession. I received an email the other day from a former associate that made the switch from public accounting to private industry. She is a young woman who has basically burnt out of public accounting because of the long hours (all year, not just during busy season) and the continual focus on the billable hour. She had enough and needed work/life balance. She has gone into industry and is getting the balance she is looking for, plus benefits that are not available to non-owners in public accounting practice. Public accounting has lost some real potential with her leaving. I'm sure she won't come back and she is exactly what our profession needs. We have to find ways to keep other like her from leaving. How?

We need to eliminate the focus on billable hours. Number of hours billed has become a worthless metric and is very outdated. The value that we create with our work is not measurable by how many hours we spend on a project multiplied by some arbitrary number. Sometimes we can spend a very short period of time on a project and yet create a great deal of value and other times we spend a long time on a project and create no value. We need to become more focused on creating value for our clients and billing for the value we create. Projects that don't create value (compliance) need to be done as quickly and efficiently as possible, if they are done at all. This will help us keep our people because they won't be under so much pressure to bill time for the sake of billing time, but they will be focused on creating value for our clients which should lead to greater job satisfaction and higher client and employee retention.