What Staff Want to Know About How Your Firm Works

Personnel in any organization, from widget manufacturers to hospitals to baseball teams, work with more commitment and drive when they genuinely feel part of the organization.

When staff understand how they fit in the overall scheme, grasp the essentials of how a CPA firm operates like a business and what types of activities lead most directly to success, their production increases and they are more energized.

I have been advocating for years that all CPA firms should meet with their staff periodically and teach them The Business of Public Accounting and How CPA Firms Work.  I recently gave a 2 hour presentation on this topic to a group of 10 young staff.  Here’s what they had to say after the session:

“This session provided great, useful information about the real world that is not taught in the classroom.”

“Great information about the industry with very useful statistics and facts.”

“Marc provided some very useful insight, especially regarding what it takes to succeed in the firm.”

“That was the first time I learned about how firms work and the compensation of partners and staff.”

“Great! I liked learning about the different statistics and ratios.”

“Learning how firms are run as a business, how much partners earn, how they have to build succession/exit plans, etc. was very valuable.”

“We received a better understanding of CPA firms and how they function. ”

“There wasn’t much to dislike in this session, the speaker was so good and provided all of us with some good practical knowledge.”

“The presentations covered aspects of accounting that I haven’t learned before, such as the staff-to-partner and other ratios.”

We believe so strongly in the Best Practice of training staff on how CPA firms work that, well…we wrote a book on it: How CPA Firms Work: The Business of Public Accounting.

It was written specifically for CPA firms to give to each new hire as part of their employee orientation program, so we also created a very liberal quantity discount policy to encourage firms to purchase the book in bulk quantities.