Posts by Kristen Rampe, CPA
As featured in the CPA Leadership Journal. Do you want your CPA firm to thrive for years to come? Invest in the future of your firm by prioritizing new partner development. Use these ten best practices in new partner development to guide your firm to a bright future. 1. Communicate the Benefits of Partnership Never…
The plight of any professional is a continuous status of “busy”. Even when it’s not busy, or not “busy season”, we’re “busy”. In many professional realms busy is a badge of honor; it means you’re good, people want to work with you, and the revenue stream is strong. Acknowledging that being continuously busy has its…
Generating business is essential to all CPA firms. Even during times when firms are more desperate for staff than they are for new business, clients leave. Ideally, you will replace those clients with work that is even more profitable or better aligned with your niche. Business development still matters. Many firms generate new revenue from…
When two or three partners start a CPA firm together, it’s common to simplify how income is allocated. Often ownership percentages are split equally (e.g. 50/50, or 33/33/33) and total compensation or excess profits may be split the same way or with a small, fixed variation (e.g. $50k stipend to the managing partner, then 50/50)….
The staffing shortage continues to put pressure on CPA firms from top to bottom. Most firms already have enough clients, and serving them is often prioritized over looking for more. For most accounting professionals, choosing between starting on another client engagement or engaging in business development is easy: the client always wins. After all, approximately…
It used to be a pretty standard requirement, that for someone to be invited to become an equity owner at a CPA firm, they had to show achievement in, or strong potential for, new business development. How else could the firm continue to grow, or even remain stable with typical annual customer attrition? Rarely would…
The Rosenberg Survey Analysis includes the perspective of consultants across the nation each year on the past 12 months and the 12 months up ahead. The last year has been unique, to say the least, and the consultants’ responses consistently highlighted themes around staffing issues, flexible and remote work arrangements, and regular reviews of client…
It’s no secret that small to mid-sized CPA firms don’t have the same resources to manage their firms that the Top 100 do. Plus, smaller firm owners enjoy the freedom that comes with being able to do what they want and not be subject to corporate policies, red tape, bureaucracy, and other negative aspects of…
We polled a group of senior associates recently and asked what they believed the top five expectations of their role were. That is, what do the partners of the firm expect these seniors to do all day? They were not given time to research answers from any company documents describing expectations of seniors, just a…
In our work with CPA firms on partner compensation, we have asked countless partners what they think about various performance criteria and whether or not they should factor into a partner’s allocation of income. Some examples of the performance criteria include firm management, business development, client service, billable hours. Another criterion we ask about is…
Kristen Rampe, CPA
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