Partner Retreats Can Boost Your Stats

A well-planned retreat can have real impact on your firm’s performance. A $2.4M client of ours who holds annual management retreats (sole practitioner, COO and key managers) wrote with this news when reflecting on their year over year improvements:

“You would love our stats. In comparison to the prior fiscal year: 

• We shrunk our client count by 15%.
• Our total collections grew 12%.
• We worked and billed almost the exact same total # of hours.   
• Our average hourly rate billed (after adjustments) increased $34, a 25% increase.
• Our average billings per client increased just over $1,000.”

There are three overarching steps in executing a retreat that can give your firm results like these:

1. Plan well. What does good retreat planning look like? Try these steps.

• Clarify what topics are most critical to be covered during the retreat
• Define the specific outcomes you wish to see as a result of your time together
• Allow issues, that can be reviewed, decided or moved forward without discussion of the whole group, to progress without taking up time on your retreat agenda
• Make sure you know how you make decisions and take action as a group
• Allow your partner group to focus on the highest and best use of your time when meeting in person together

CPA Firm Retreats: The Do-It-Yourself Guide helps firms organize their retreats. Chapters include ►ground rules for participants ►alternative retreat formats ►logistics and ►how to implement retreat ideas. The book provides specific discussion questions that the facilitator can use to stimulate conversation in topics such as ►profitability ►managing staff ►mergers ►succession planning ►marketing ►partner accountability ►firm governance ►partner compensation and ►partner buyout plans.

Purchase your copy today!

2. Stay on track. Are there decisions to be made? During your retreat, stick to your thoughtful agenda.

• Be clear about what decision needs to be made on a given topic. Is there a strategy you’re trying to form? A decision on how to compensate new partners? Whether or not to acquire another firm this year?
• Utilize the best facilitator you have available to stay on topic, on time with your agenda and get to those key decision points.
• If it’s not possible to finalize a decision, because a lack of information or new information, determine next steps before you leave the retreat.
  
  But not everything in a retreat is a decision. Other critical partner-group functions include brainstorming ideas for a separate committee to work through after the retreat, and good old-
  fashioned team-building. Don’t ignore the agenda items focused on partner relations – they are just as important, if not more, as getting to decisions.

3. Execute. Who will be responsible for taking action after the retreat? This is the biggest challenge to post-retreat success. The stats cited by our client above didn’t happen without concerted effort by the partners and managers to make it happen.

• Who will be ultimately accountable to hold other partners accountable for action items and goals arising from the retreat? Typically, this is the MP, but could be a COO or another partner.
• Which individual partners, committees or other personnel will do the heavy lifting on whatever directives or decisions were made?
• How frequently will the partner group be given updates on progress? A dashboard-style presentation of initiatives and progress can make this easy to review without taking up a lot of meeting time.

If you’re planning a retreat this year, what kind of stats do you want to see on the other side?