CPAs Get Ready to Rumble as Economy Revs Up
On the agenda: changing jobs, boosting business, buying a practice, or finally taking retirement. What are your plans?
by Rick Telberg
At Large for the AICPA
Tax, accounting and finance professionals seem to be bursting at the seams to make the business and career moves they've long back-burnered because of a skittish economy, roiling regulatory changes and unpredictable technology shifts.
One middle manger in a local CPA firm has told me he can hardly wait for when his firm's senior ownership retires this year. He'll "begin to transition the firm ownership from the retiring owners to myself." Meanwhile, he also knows he needs to upgrade the technology systems, some of which date from 1970s DOS applications.
Meanwhile, one sole proprietor, who prefers go nameless, says he is deciding to pull the plug on slow-paying clients and focus only on Grade A customers. But he also knows he needs to catch up on his own billing and start to go paperless.
Some of these conclusions are gleaned from a study I just completed among 176 volunteers, about two thirds of them in public practice.
Overall, here are five top strategies that CPAs are implementing this year:
1. Increase revenue and/or profit: 52%
2. Upgrade my office productivity: 49%
3. Expand into new niches or lines: 28%
4. Get a new job: 22%
5. Change underperforming personnel and/or cut spending: 18%
While there's some evident pent-up demand for progress among members in public practice, there is a palpable level of trepidation among members in business and industry.
One middle-level financial manager at a small business has but one major concern right now: "To survive an outsourcing study." Meanwhile, he's already started looking for a new job.
Indeed, members in industry seem, as a group, preoccupied with job hunting, or failing that, going into public practice. It's an interesting reversal from the last several years when public CPAs were flocking to corporate jobs for the supposed perks and security. Today CPAs realize: You are your own boss, whether you work for one client (an employer) or many (as in a practice).
And yet, the differences in business and career objectives between the two spheres of the accounting universe are sometimes stark.
For instance, chief executives and managing partners, by a whopping 2-to-1 margin, are driving for increased revenue and profit this year. So maybe it's no coincidence that 56 percent of staffers say they're looking for new jobs.
Middle managers may be feeling the squeeze the most. Their top objective this year is to upgrade their productivity. They are also the least confident that the economy will be kind to them. Three-in-four middle managers, or 73 percent, expect business improvements this year. That's good, but it's also a significant gap from the 82 percent of senior and chief executives and partners who expect improvements.
Just as middle managers may be feeling pressured, mid-sized firms are too. Fully 86 percent of firms with 11 to 50 full-time equivalents are more confident than not about the economy. But in the area of firms numbering 51 to 100 employees, only 67 percent are as positive.
To be sure, that's all to the good. But the discrepancy suggests a time of troubling questions and tough challenges for many firms as they decide their long-term futures.
