Most accountants are so busy practicing accounting that they don’t have time to make money. They “manage” by benign neglect, and hope everything will turn out okay. There are lots of ways to do things wrong, and we have seen many of them. We also can tell you how to do the most important things right. Over the years we have designed simple but effective systems of practice control and management that have enabled our client firms to enjoy tremendous increases in net income. And they have done this without cutting costs or working harder — just working smarter.

Only a small fraction of accountants earn what they’re worth. Accountants who make $400,000 a year do not work twice as hard as those who make $200,000. They just work smarter. They know what to do to have a highly profitable firm that will provide them with financial security.

Many accountants are wasting time trying to invent solutions to problems that have already been solved a hundred times. They just don’t know that these solutions are available. If you use the same management techniques that the super-profitable firms do, they will work for you also.

We can show you how to be more profitable. We don’t use a theoretical “ivory tower” approach to firm management. Instead, our techniques are nitty-gritty, dirt-under-the-fingernails, real-world approaches to making as much money as you are worth.

• You’re having difficulty coping with economic stress in your community, or

   

• You know what you need to change but you don’t know how to do it, or

   

• You’ve got too many ideas from the last practice management conference you attended and you don’t know which ones are best for your firm, or

   

• You’re uncertain about how to lift your practice from its current level to a higher plane of profitability or growth

   

• This program is not for everyone. You practice should be invoicing at least $1,000,000. In fact, it’ll probably be a waste of 10 minutes for you even to read this section unless you meet one of the following additional criteria:
   

• Your average net income per partner/owner is less than $250,000.
   

• Your gross has been growing, but your profits are not keeping pace. Sometimes you feel like you are just “swapping dollars.”
   

• Your reasonably successful practice has stagnated. Competitors are catching up with you and taking away clients. Referrals are fewer and farther between, and it’s getting harder and harder to make a good income.
   

• You’re a medium-sized practice in a competitive marketplace and you’re not getting as many new clients as you’d like.
   

• You’ve got considerable resources (capital, employees, facilities, etc.) from which you’re not getting maximum productivity.
   

• You’re thinking of retiring in the next few years and you want to build up your practice to sell it for maximum advantage.

If any of the above situations apply to your practice, we invite you to purchase a Confidential Practice Consultation to find out whether our Practice Profitability Program can help. At the very least, we will either give you several good ideas right over the telephone of how to improve your practice or we will confirm that you are doing an excellent job of managing your firm already.

For example: Say that we could have shown you how to invoice — and collect — 6% to 8% more chargeable hours than you are getting now — and without working any more overtime than you currently do. If you don’t take advantage of this opportunity, how much money are you losing every year?

If you need practical help you can trust—our program lets you use us as your management coach for 36 full months. We call it the Practice Profitability Program, and it’s the most comprehensive management service we offer. This extensive program is so complete and so totally tailored for you that (unless you fail to act on it) we guarantee you will attain your goal or we don’t get paid.

What the Practice Profitability Program includes:

To be considered for the Practice Profitability Program a firm must first purchase a Confidential Practice Consultation. Then, if you and we both agree, we will schedule an on-site additional paid consultation to explore your firm’s potential in depth.

This on-site consultation allows your partner/owners and Dave Cottle to get to know each other and decide if they want to work together intensively over the next three years.

Both the Confidential Practice Consultation and the on-site consultation are subject to David Cottle Consulting’s unconditional satisfaction guarantee.

Immediately after acceptance into the program, you complete a comprehensive pre-consultation questionnaire and firm financial analysis. This “Firm Profile” helps supply us with data we need to produce the optimum consultation results and management program for your firm. These questions are so thorough, in fact, you may have never thought of some of them (but probably should have asked them of yourself years ago).

We go through every point of your questionnaire and financial analysis inside and out, so we have an extensive overview of your unique (and individual) firm.

We come to your office to study your firm and extensively consult with you. At your office, we will examine many of your management and marketing practices and the reasons behind them. We’ll dig deep — the same way you diagnose an important tax or business problem for your clients. This visit may take two to three days, depending on the size of your firm.

After analyzing and evaluating the most important facets of your operation, we develop a well-reasoned written Practice Profitability Program, tailored for your specific situation. We formulate a thoughtful program of action for your firm which comprehends our insights and hidden opportunities you may not have seen or fully understood.

We deliver your program and review it personally with you and your key people. We’ll go over the program point-by-point. We’ll explain any ideas, techniques and strategies that aren’t entirely clear to you, and we’ll review the rationale behind why we recommended the things we did. Then together, you and we will decide what to do immediately — that day — and what to put into place within the first month and three months.

• Evaluate the effectiveness of your current marketing efforts and develop ways to increase the inflow of new clients. This might include scrutinizing all your current marketing materials such as brochures, marketing letters, advertising, engagement letters, proposal letters, business cards, and the appearance of your offices.
   

• Work with each principal individually to develop a person marketing plan.
   

• Examine your existing administrative and internal reporting procedures and recommend improvements, specifically with a view to increasing the effectiveness of executive time required to manage the firm. This might include evaluating your current management reports for efficiency (ease of preparation) and effectiveness (do they include the right information, in the right form, at the right time, in the right level of detail). We would determine which key operating information you need to monitor the operations of each office. We would help you design reports which are quick and cost-effective to prepare, contain the right information (but not too much information) and are easy to review.
   

• Evaluate your current invoicing methods and engagement letters with a view to recommending appropriate improvements. This would include calculating your current revenues per person for all personnel levels, reviewing your standard charge-out rates, reviewing your invoicing methods, forms, and the wording used on invoices.
   

• Train appropriate personnel in management, client relations, pricing, marketing, executive leadership, and sales skills necessary to keep your income at the new, higher level. This skill-building will come from our own proprietary training seminars or courses developed by others which both parties might mutually select, as needed. In other words, our goal is that at the end of this Program you will not have to depend on us to keep up the higher income; you can maintain and increase the higher income levels using your own personnel; we will train you to “do it yourself.”

We often invest approximately four days of Cottle’s time per quarter for the first year of this Program. After the first year, our time commitment depends on your mutually-agreed needs and is expected to shift gradually to trouble-shooting, personal marketing coaching with personnel, telephone consultation, and perhaps attendance at firm retreats, as requested.

We anticipate that we will invest the greatest amount of time in the first year when we are training, coaching, and working on marketing for you. After then, our time commitment will decline as we move into a mode of monitoring and “trouble shooting.”

Then, we’ll be constantly available by telephone and in person as needed throughout the 36 months as you carry out the strategies we’ve developed for you. We’ll be there to help you through any unanticipated problem or opportunity. Any time you have an interpretive question or an implementation problem or situation you’d like to discuss, we’re literally a phone call away. And if you don’t call us, we call you. It’s our job.

The on-site visits are only the beginning.

Keep in mind that the on-site visits are only part of this consulting service. Once we complete our first visit with our observations and notes, the real work begins, because we access our knowledge base to put together effective, simple but powerful, management strategies and tactics you need. In short, it’s a program formulated exclusively for your firm, to produce the exact growth and profits you want over the next three years and beyond.

This program isn’t just the on-site evaluation and resulting management program, but a continuing, “hands-on” sounding board you can turn to for the next 36 months.

Is this a “management insurance policy?”

No. Obviously, we can’t do it alone. We may be the coach, but you and your people are the players. Once we design your “game plan,” our written program explains it in language you can understand, accept, and act on confidently. We thoroughly discuss it with you and your key people so it makes absolute sense to you.

A typical plan might include some, all or more of the following components:

• A comprehensive examination of your main management problems and opportunities using the 5 “keys to profitability”
   

• Standing above the crowd of competitors: How to answer the critical question, “Why should people choose your firm instead of someone else?” — specific ways to have people think of you above all your competitors
   

• How to correctly implement and execute each management program we recommend, and what pitfalls to avoid
   

• A comprehensive management strategy integrating all 5 profit keys to produce a balanced program and — depending upon your practice — exactly how to produce the profit results you want
   

• Overlooked management techniques that not one in 50 accountants employs—techniques which can boost revenue up to 30%, usually with little or no increase in cost
   

• What to do for your particular practice to benefit most from your current client base
   

• A critical review of your current marketing—its strengths and weaknesses, how to improve it, what to do more of, and what to terminate

The Practice Profitability Program is not a “cure-all.”

Because of the limited time available we cannot cover your partner/owner compensation plan, nor can we review your Partner/ownership Agreement. Likewise, it does not include assistance with mergers, acquisitions, or selling the practice. If we identify a need in this area, we’ll bring it to your attention. You may then choose to engage us to help you in these complex areas.

Will we solve all your management problems? Of course not: We put our pants on one leg at a time, just like you do. But we can help you focus on the right problems. You only have so many hours a day and so many financial and personnel resources. How can you tell where to invest your time and resources so you get the maximum results toward your goals? We will identify and help you handle the most important barriers that are keeping you from earning substantially more from your practice. 

“As soon as you get all your ducks in a row, they bring out more ducks!”

After you lift your firm to a new level of profitability, you will have a set of different problems: The problems caused by success!

Many firms can readily attain their profit goal, even an aggressive goal, without adding personnel — simply by earning more revenue with existing people (and not working more overtime). That means that most of the additional revenue we help them earn is pure profit. We call it “top line management.”

To illustrate the beautiful simplicity of “top line management”: Your payroll and overhead costs (your “middle lines”) are pretty well fixed. So if you don’t need to expand personnel or facilities, then the cost to produce additional revenue (which is almost all profit) includes only your marketing expenses. If we can bring you a 10-to-1 R.O.I. on marketing costs then for each $100 you spend marketing, you’ll bring in $1,000 of revenue, $900 of which drops to the bottom line. It means that any firm not operating at optimum capacity with both personnel and facilities (and that’s most firms) could see their profits skyrocket with our top line management approach.

Theoretically, you could really prosper if you’ve got capacity to handle, say 20% more business, without any increase in costs. And if we can help get you that 20% increase at anything under 100% marketing cost, it’s gravy, isn’t it?

Here is a real-life example: Working with a large regional firm, we discovered that their productivity was lower than would be expected for a firm like theirs. We looked at the firm, asked a few of the right questions (most of which had never occurred to them), and discovered a way to increase their productivity by 15%—with no increase in cost! This means the firm could add 15% new business, with no added expense. Six months later I saw the managing partner at a conference and he said, “Our P & L (after partner salaries) has doubled!”

Did they consciously want to be under-productive? Definitely not, but many accountants are uncomfortable asking employees (or their fellow partner/owners) to make reasonable productivity goals. They don’t want to be slave drivers, and often they’re just afraid of the reaction if they ask their people to set worthwhile goals and achieve them.

We have coached hundreds, if not thousands, of accountants on how to raise prices from 10 to 30 percent. And in every case, clients losses were minimal and the accountants were delighted that they had listened to us.

Did they consciously want to be underpriced? Of course not, but many accountants are very afraid to raise prices. They don’t want to gouge people, and often they’re just afraid of charging what they are really worth because they don’t really believe that they are worth it. Yet there are many professional services where price isn’t even very important — areas where clients are willing to pay far more than their accountants would think to charge! In fact, $100,000 of a $700,000 increase in profits one of our clients realized came from just one value pricing opportunity that the firm would never have recognized if we had not trained them in value pricing. Often it takes a knowledgeable outsider like us to convince these partner/owners of their true value . . . and to train them to recognize these profit opportunities.

By actual survey, over 60% of the time accountants can increase prices with no significant client loss. It sounds simple, and it is; but “simple” doesn’t mean “easy.” You have to know what to do — and what not to do — to get the increase accepted. Fortunately, we know how; we routinely show firms how to raise prices from 10% to (in one case) over 30% — usually without the loss of a single significant client. And the impact this top line increase makes on the bottom line is dramatic—often spectacular.

We also help you train your partner/owners and employees, but not the usual “debits and credits” type of training. You can teach your people to think management, marketing, and client relations, and how to do it. If you can teach them to think, you’ll feel more confident in delegating more to them. The more you delegate, the more you’ll produce, because the more they’ll produce for you. But . . . you can’t delegate to untrained people. These crucial partner/owners and employees must leverage you by operating without close supervision. Our training systems can help you prepare them. To insure this crucial training, we’ll provide your firm a complete set of our audio and video cassette learning systems with detailed work-study guides for you and your people to digest. We will also provide on site training led by Dave Cottle personally.

It’s not for small practices. We’d love to accept smaller firms, but we work on a contingent fee based on the increase in profits.. There might not be enough to work with in a smaller practice. For example, if we add 20% to a $200,000 profit, that’s only a $40,000 profit increase. But if we add 20% to a $750,000 profit, that’s $150,000 in extra profits. And if we add 20% to a $3,000,000 to $5,000,000 profit, we come off like super-heroes!

If our track-record is any guide (and we think it is), we’ll probably increase your productivity from existing people by 5% to 10% and you’ll need to attract more business to take advantage of this. Our recommendation: If you don’t have the willingness and confidence level to commit at least 3% of your revenues to marketing your firm, you probably should not consider this service.

On the other hand, if you’ve built a solid base of clients and have been considering (and been ready for) making a major effort to increase your profitability, this service will prove invaluable. And if you’ve built a medium-sized to larger firm, you’ll benefit most of all. It’s not unusual for us to increase a large firm’s profits by $300,000 to $1,000,000 or more.