Rosenberg Associates Blog
Marc Rosenberg, CPAThe following are highlights from a recent meeting of my Chicago large firm Roundtable group, an assemblage of 75% of the top local Windy City firms that has been meeting for 20 years. The group’s MPs shared some current best practices they’ve adopted to improve growth and profitability. When a rainmaker becomes MP. Delegate enough clients…
About 7-8 years ago, while idling away my time in an airport somewhere, I listed the Best Practices for profitability and success at CPA firms. My initial list numbered 40 or so, but I cut it down to the top 25. Since this inaugural list was created, I have bounced it off savvy MPs and…
A response to a recent post has sparked the sort of lively dialogue every blogger dreams of, especially since these comments came from my mentor, Irwin Friedman, founder and former MP of FER&S (a national Top 25 firm that merged into RSM McGladrey in the late 1990s). Irwin was responding to my November 12, 2013…
A recent question from a client got me thinking about a new metric. The questions was: “I wonder how our average staff compensation compares with other firms. This could be an important metric – perhaps it significantly affects profitability.” To analyze this question, I referred to data from our most recent Rosenberg MAP Survey. We…
Not always. You can’t blame a CPA for measuring profitability with gross margin percentage. It’s the most basic term we learn in Cost Accounting 101. But paradoxically, it’s not always a reliable measure in CPA firms to measure profitability. For the reasons stated below, we don’t like using gross margin analysis at CPA firms. Instead,…
True story: A client of mine with long-standing profitability problems called after reading our latest MAP survey. As usual, his firm lagged behind almost every industry norm. But with great pride, he told me that his firm’s net firm billing rate was 20% higher than the industry average. I had to puncture his balloon by…
The genesis of this post is a letter I wrote as a 14 year-old to the Chicago Daily News positing that my boyhood idol, the late Ron Santo was more valuable than the day’s reining superstars, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. The newspaper editor began his response with “Statistics can be a splendid irrelevancy.” He…
Do you want to find quick, easy ways to increase profitability?
If your answer to the above question is “yes”, this blog may disappoint you.
If your firm is not as profitable today as you’d like …
The genesis of this question comes from one of the most hotly debated issues in CPA firm practice management: Is it better for partners to have high or low billable hours?
Here are billable hour facts for partners in multi-partner firms from The Rosenberg 2012 MAP Survey :
A recent monthly roundtable comprised of 25 MPs from most of Chicago’s largest local firms was devoted to the group’s annual benchmarking and profitability analysis. In discussions, these highlights emerged:
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