Is Your Work “Challenging Your Team”?

Is Your Work “Challenging Your Team”?

Are you having trouble recruiting or keeping good clever team members – if so why not “challenge” them?

Good clever team members are always going to be in demand.  At some stage in the future the economy will be operating at a higher level than at present.  This will mean that many of your good team members will be approached by other organisations to join them.  One way of protecting yourself against the possibility of losing staff in the future and at the same time developing a number of “new income streams” for your accountancy business, is to challenge your team members to get involved in a wider variety of work then just taxation.

There are many other activities that accountants can offer to small/medium enterprise clients if you put on a “commercial hat” rather than the traditional “compliance hat”.

These activities include:

  • Supplying “Virtual Chief Financial Officer” services to your clients. This relates to offering a service that saves the business having to employ a full-time accountant and enables your firm to supply a “full commercial service” to your clients who are interested in hiring you for this purpose.
  • Identifying government grants for small medium enterprises – there are hundreds of government grants supplied by the federal state and territory governments most of which supply a wide range of services to small medium enterprises at 50% of the normal cost.

This The big advantage of government grants is that proactive accountants offering a range of business advisory services can perform many of the activities that are funded by government grants.

  • Capital raising for small/medium enterprises – a new era for small/ medium enterprises is with us. We already have Early Stage Innovation Companies and in a few weeks Crowd-Sourced Funding – Equity Raising will be launched.

The government has announced that it will be tabling legislation in Parliament to vary the Crowd-Sourced Funding Legislation so as to enable Propriety Limited Companies to be able to participate in Crowd-Sourced Funding without first having to convert to an Unlisted Public Company.

These two new types of companies give an outstanding opportunity to smaller companies to be able to raise capital and offers proactive accountants the opportunity to create “new income streams” and to offer very interesting work to your team.  This type of activity will definitely “challenge” your team.

  • Personal Property Securities Register Registration and Due Diligence Reviews.

I recently conducted a series of workshops funded by the Entrepreneurs’ Program (Australian government) for company directors in small medium enterprises.

Less than 5% of the attending company directors were aware of the operations of the Personal Property Securities Register.

Less than 1% of the attendees indicated that they had been approached by their accountants to undertake a due diligence review of their business’ systems relative to registering customers and other activities on the Personal Property Securities Register.

The Personal Property Securities Register is like “quicksand” in that a significant number of SMEs know nothing about it and probably won’t know anything about it until they suffer a significant financial penalty because they have not registered a customer or an activity on the Personal Property Securities Register.

I would be very embarrassed if one of my clients got caught by not registering customers and other activities on the Personal Property Securities Register – wouldn’t you feel very embarrassed?

  • If accountants are going to embrace the opportunity to offer a wider range of services to help counterbalance the decline in taxation return income it will undoubtedly be necessary for accountancy businesses to be far more proactive than what most currently are, relative to marketing and professional sales activities.

One way of motivating and challenging your team is to have them participate in marketing and professional sales training with the SMEs that they are responsible for.

  • Are you using benchmarking reports to assist your clients to have a better understanding of how their business is performing? This can be a great area for younger accountants to get involved in to give them an insight into some of the problems confronting small medium enterprises.

Accountants operate in a very dynamic and interesting segment of the market – servicing small/medium enterprises.  These clients in the main do not employ qualified accountants – but they have many of the same problems that larger businesses which do employ internal Accountants have.

This is a great opportunity for you to “challenge your accountancy team members” to give them interesting work to undertake and supply the type of services that many of your small/medium enterprise clients have identified in survey after survey over the last fifteen years that they require as part of their desire to add you to their businesses.

ESS BIZTOOLS, ESS BIZGRANTS and ESS BASIP have developed a range of services and products to assist accountants to deliver these services.

 

Please visit our websites for more information:
www.essbiztools.com.au

www.essbizgrants.com.au

www.essbasip.com.au

or you can contact me direct [email protected], Telephone 0724 1118

Peter Towers
Latest posts by Peter Towers (see all)

RELATED ARTICLES

Sign up to our eBulletin to receive regular updates, event invites and industry offers.

SUBSCRIBE NOW