Kat Jennings - Business Development For CPAs

While many firms search to find talent at the 3-7 year level, a better solution is being provided to accommodate a firms’ growth today. We have been studying this phenomenon carefully for a few years now. It is a real problem when stakeholders in CPA firms do not have the expertise available to get the increased workload done. With tax reform creating more work for everyone, the stakes are about to get higher this season and beyond. In this post, I will first explain why firms are having such great difficulty attracting tax and accounting professionals with 3-10 years of experience and then a  solution to the fast changing phenomenon in hiring and retention.

There are firms emerging as “Fast Thinking” and those who will fall behind with “Jurassic Thinking”. Firms we characterize as “fast thinking” are the innovators who come up with new ways of improving their business operations. These “innovators” create change and are risk tolerant. These are known to be about 2.5 percent of the population. These innovators are viewed as unusual at first until their ideas grow larger into acceptance and are then followed by the “early adopters”. Early adopters are well-known leaders that function as cross-pollinators spreading ideas to others in the profession. Then the “early majority” arrives who follow the early adopters. The “late majority” follows after that and adopts the ideas once it becomes mainstream. We then have the “laggards” who are fixated on keeping things just the way they are in their Jurassic thinking and they ultimately become extinct.

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