Jack up your earnings

Jack up your earnings

There are more ways to make money than plain old audit. Sarah Perrinexperiences the latest guru-led, fervour-inducing management training -this time designed just for accountants

‘One of the things Boot Campers do is literally fire clients. One guy on a Boot Camp walked out of the room, and you knew he was on a mission.

When he came back, he threw the door open and said: ‘I just picked up the phone and I fired a client.’ The whole of the room went “Yes!” .’ The Boot Camper was a sole practitioner and he had just fired a # 25,000-a-year client.

Sound alarming? Training for accountants will never be the same. The Boot Campers are on the march, and their plan is to stomp right into the front line of the profession through a combination of added value services and rigorous systems.

Their inspiration is charismatic trainer and speaker Paul Dunn who set up a training company in 1981 and later devised a special programme for accountants, now known by the somewhat unnerving catchphrase, the ‘Accountants’ Boot Camp’. His company, Results Accountants’ Systems, has spread its Boot Camp message through Australia and on to New Zealand, the USA, and Austria, arriving in the UK in 1995.

Relaxing in London’s Langham Hilton this month after a series of three one-day courses for accountants on how to re-engineer their practices, essentially a taster of what the Boot Camps offer, Dunn assesses the profession’s future. He talks in a mild antipodean twang of the current pressures facing accountants in practice: clients wanting to pay less for routine compliance work, and other service providers, such as banks, entering the market.

‘To say that the profession is under threat and that, therefore, people are going to die is probably an exaggeration,’ Dunn says. ‘But there are going to be people who just survive, and I don’t mean survive well, I mean eke out a living.’

Dunn’s solution is for the profession to fight back by placing itself firmly in the role of valued business adviser. Handing over the annual accounts and asking for a fee is not good enough. Auditors must concentrate on showing their receptive clients how they can develop their businesses, boosting their own fees in the process. The Boot Camp programme is designed to show accountants how to step out along that path.

The message itself is not new. The difference comes in the zeal with which the message is delivered and, more tangibly, in the support systems designed to make sure professionals achieve that trusted adviser position.

Where to spend

Dunn stresses that this is not just another training exercise in how to market your accountancy practice. In fact, he is scathing on the subject of various well-tried marketing tools such as brochures and posters, where no one has ever measured how many clients they won.

‘Whenever accountants come to this programme they have this presumption that what we are talking about is how you market your practice. That’s not it at all. The profession has got sucked in.’

Dunn recounts how he managed to save one partner from wasting cash on a marketing exercise. The partner, who had just completed a Boot Camp, confessed that he had been on the verge of going to a partner’s meeting and recommending expenditure of # 26,000 on a telemarketing campaign. After the Boot Camp, he scrapped the idea. The lesson he learnt was that it was far better to spend cash on your existing clients, helping them grow, than simply increasing client numbers. In fact, it may be better to have fewer clients.

One accountant returned after a Boot Camp and was asked what was the most significant thing he had done in the last five months. He said he had fired 200 clients. He had started with 400. The really good news was that his fees had risen by 20%.

Results Accountants’ Systems claims that firms implementing their programme can double total fees in under two years.

Lively learning

Camps last four days, starting at 8.30 in the morning and running on until at least 9.30 at night. Campers, two from each firm, cover a vast array of material under session headings such as ’24 proven steps to building a brilliant practice’, ‘How to turn your people into a high-performing team’, ‘The Socratic methodology’ and ‘New ways of listening that dramatically enhance fee opportunities’.

The learning experience is designed to be fun, participatory and lively.

Indeed, some of the session headings smack of such dynamic commercialism that the more conservative professionals may be put off. Dunn admits this danger.

‘A lot of people hear about my passion. That’s something I need to modify.

It can put people off. “It’s hypey” – this is what they hear. If a guy after a Boot Camp says “It’s changed my life”, you do not associate that with a pragmatic programme. You associate that with a religious experience.

But the truth is nobody walked over hot coals, nobody had a religious experience. They saw common sense.’

The common sense comes with a price tag: # 4,170 plus VAT for the next Camp in Brighton in October. But, Dunn explains, that covers four days of sessions, accommodation and meals, about # 1,200 worth of resources to help implement the philosophy, and on-going support from a dedicated UK team whose sole purpose is to make sure participating firms don’t go away and simply file their new knowledge without taking action.

‘We have this phrase – FTI – Failure To Implement,’ Dunn says. ‘It’s a disease. So often people go to a programme. Hopefully, they think it’s great, but then nothing happens. We are very conscious of the fact that our success is only ensured by people going and doing the things we ask them to.’

Implementation

Boot Campers receive plenty of encouragement to implement the re-engineering programme. ‘We will thump them,’ Dunn teases. ‘Every Thursday we fax them a report. They fill it out. If they don’t send it back, they get a difficult phone call.’ The report details the steps taken that week to implement the Boot Camp programmes.

Increasing fees is the bottom line message of the Boot Camps. Select ambitious clients, spend time with them, help them grow and then watch fee income rise. Dunn claims that firms implementing the system typically increase fees from selected clients by a minimum of three times. ‘And the client likes paying,’ Dunn says, ‘because the client is getting value.

‘The client most accountants choose to work with in this is the person who is forward looking, the person who has the positive disposition, who is willing to listen to advice, who wants to grow their business. There are enough of those people who really will value the help the accountant gives.’

The concept of measurement is also key to Boot Campers because ‘what you can measure you can manage’. For example, Dunn queries, why spend money on brochures if you don’t measure how many new clients they have won you? Why not establish and measure the performance of systems for catching referral business if that is where you believe most new clients come from? The Boot Camp message is based on common sense, Dunn stresses.

‘It’s what I call a BFO – a Blinding Flash of the Obvious,’ he says.

The blinding flash does seem to be spreading. Around 3,000 accountants around the world have been through the Boot Camp experience and the international network is growing. Fellow Boot Campers are starting to pass on business to each other, Dunn says. If a UK firm has a client who wants to do business in, say, San Francisco, the firm tends to refer him to another member of the network who will have the same systems and the same professional philosophy.

Traditionalists may find aspects of the Boot Camp style a little brash, too American in flavour perhaps. But Dunn explains that he has to speak in a language at the upper levels of credibility in order to inspire audiences with the enthusiasm they will need to see the programmes through. Even in ordinary conversation, Dunn is a man whose speech is coloured with images. Coming on a Boot Camp is rather like the experience of studying a ‘Magic Eye’ picture, he says, where you start out staring at a page that appears to be simply a blur of multi-coloured dots. ‘The typical accountant looks at that and tries to count the dots. What we say is: you have got to almost defocus, and then you start to see other things and the picture clicks into place.’

But underneath the gloss, the Boot Camp is about hard work. Explaining the philosophy and conveying the vision with sufficient clarity to persuade the other partners to fire clients is the first hurdle to be vaulted.

Even if the partners buy into the vision, carrying the whole team through the process of establishing new added value systems requires dedication and effort.

Boot Camps do not provide an easy option, but one full of challenges.

As Dunn himself says, it’s not just ‘sprinkle magic stardust, go forth and multiply stuff’.

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