Strategic Advisor Blog

LivePlan’s mission is to help people succeed in business, both accountants and their small business clients, which makes QuickBooks Connect the ideal conference for us.

Few professional experiences can be quite as exciting, rewarding, or potentially overwhelming as starting a new business. As a new business owner, you’re going to need all the practical and impartial advice you can get.

Small businesses want help from accountants on strategic planning and financial forecasting. This word cloud represents a summary of popular responses from small businesses when we asked them this question:

“If you could get help in one area of your business right now, what would it be?”

A SWOT analysis is an incredibly simple, yet powerful tool to help you develop your business strategy, whether you’re building a startup or guiding an existing company.

When starting a new business, surely your focus needs to be on getting the business and the product up and running. You only have a few employees at most, so there’s nothing to worry about on the “people” front.

Right? Wrong.

You and your business partner decided to go into business together for a number of reasons—probably in part to leverage each of your strengths so you’re more likely to succeed.

Ongoing collaboration is essential to your mutual success. In this ultimate guide to business partner collaboration, we’ll go over how to improve your collaboration and communication skills so you can grow your business together.

We’ve all sat through that horrible powerpoint presentation that’s nothing but bullets in 10 point font.

It’s not just boring—it’s mind-numbing. The information presented is usually hard to understand and nearly impossible to remember.

And it’s not just elevator pitch-type presentations that suffer this malady. When you get that stack of financial reports or that huge Excel file that’s nothing but numbers, most us of tend to tune out.

Scaling New Heights 2018 was a great experience! It’s always a true pleasure talking with customers face to face and reconnecting with industry peers. It’s also fascinating to see how the industry is growing and shifting year over year. This year there were a few big takeaways for me.

The accounting industry has seen rapid growth and change in the last five years. The message to accountants is clear: client advisory services are the focus.

When I decided it would be good to align LivePlan’s method for advisory services with a workflow toolset, I wasn’t sure where I would begin. Then I met Ian Vacin, VP of partnerships and education at Karbon (and known accounting industry thought leader).

Helping a client to build a more profitable and successful business is one of the most valuable things we can do. It would be crazy to price this work based on time—that would leave too much money on the table.

If you are reading this, you probably are already offering Strategic Advising Services, or researching the topic for your firm. Some of you may already be using the LivePlan Method for Strategic Advising.

I’m guessing that you also have a desire to move from being just a historian for your clients’ small businesses to someone that provides more value, and helps small business succeed, which ultimately will lead to more value for you (e.g. more revenue for your practice).

As Geoffrey James so eloquently explains in this article, “Selling is the process of making dreams come true." And even though this is absolutely true (or maybe because of this), many accountants are still very uncomfortable with the notion of “selling." They find it off-putting, or difficult at best.

This article on website optimization is pulled from LivePlan’s Best Practice webinar on sales and marketing for your accounting firm. Our own marketing director John Procopio offers concrete advice for assessing your website, and he offers a two-step checklist for implementing changes.

Anyone who has been providing client services for a while has processes that they follow. But there is a difference between haphazard processes that have grown organically, and processes that are intentional, well-considered, and documented. The difference between the former and the latter is the difference between having a firm that is merely surviving, and one that is thriving.