Managing Partners: What’s Keeping You Up at Night?

Here are some issues we’ve discussed with managing partners recently that seem to be causing bouts of insomnia:

We have 2-3 managers we’d like to make partner over the next few years, but we are having trouble deciding what their buy-in should be. The current partner group has been together a long time and has created a highly valuable firm. We hear that buy-ins today are $100-150K. At those amounts, it seems like we would be giving away substantial value and not getting much in return.

How To Bring In New Partners was written for the thousands of firms that want to bring in new, younger partners, but aren’t sure how to do it.

Our firm has grown to $8M without a high level, professional COO. It seems that many firms our size and larger have a COO on board. What does a COO do and how will the firm benefit from this substantial increase in our firm’s overhead?

The 18 chapters in CPA Firm Management & Governance teach you how to adopt the proper governance structure for your firm, as well as providing helpful checklists, handouts and job descriptions.

We hear so much about the critical important of strategic planning and how it can make firms more successful and profitable. We get that. But we don’t know how to create a strategic plan that will get results. We don’t want to spend the time and effort to develop a plan, just because some consultant tells us we should, and then find that we wasted our time because we don’t know how to implement the plan.

A client called us one day and asked us to write him a “how-to” manual for creating a strategic plan without having to hire a consultant. We turned that into Strategic Planning and Goal Setting for Results. If you follow our book, chapter by chapter, you will have created your own plan + partner goals.

Our firm has used a formula to allocate partner income forever.  We have grown to the size where we feel we should consider a change to a compensation committee. But this is a slippery slope for us- we’re accountants, comfortable with formulas. Going to a comp committee, while theoretically appealing, seems a little fuzzy at the same time. How do we do it?

We have helped dozens of firms make this change. You’re right – it’s not easy, but it’s not rocket science either. Our monograph, How To Operate a Compensation Committee, incorporates all of the Best Practices learned from our 20 years working with firms that have initiated these time-tested techniques.

Our firm seems to have hit a wall. Until recently we grew every year and profits rose along with the growth,  But now we’re struggling.  We’ve been doing things the same way we’ve always done them, so what could be wrong? What needs to change?

In working with nearly 1,000 firms over the past 20 years we’ve learned What Really Makes CPA Firms Profitable – so we’ve incorporated Best Practices gleaned from our consulting experiences on profitability into our popular monograph on the subject.

Our generous discounts – up to 50% off – make bulk purchases affordable so that all your partners can receive copies.