Make $25,000 from Your Own E-Mails

To say that e-mail usage is ubiquitous would be an understatement. Partners routinely tell me that they send and receive/read hundreds of client emails a month. Email has got to make anyone’s short list of great productivity enhancers of the past 20 years (think how it could be even better without spam, but that’s a subject for another time).

A Chicago CPA has found a way to monetize the time he spends on client emails.

Marty Albert is MP of a small Chicago-area CPA firm and a long-time member of one of my hometown roundtable groups. He shared a fabulous idea at a recent meeting. Every month, before he does his billing, he goes through his emails (both sent and received) to capture the substantial amount of time he spends exchanging emails with clients. In almost all cases, this time eludes his normal timekeeping practices, so, everything he finds is extra billing.

Albert estimates that, on average, this practice nets him 5-10 hours of billable time every month, which at his billing rate, amounts to roughly $25,000 of extra billing per year. An 8 partner firm adopting this practice would produce an extra $200,000 of revenue annually!

Marty doesn’t bill every little email, only the substantive ones which he feels have provided an added value to clients that is appreciated.

You know an idea is a great one when you see every member of the group with head down, taking copious notes. You could hear a pin drop as fellow roundtable members jotted on their notepads. At the conclusion of this little segment, we heard several people uttering the words “no-brainer.”

Our  monograph What Really Makes CPA Firms Profitable contains nearly 100 ideas and best practices for operating a highly profitable firm.