EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY | WHEN MEYNERS AND CO.
LOST one of its rainmakers, it
decided to spread the responsibility of
getting clients and new business by
training nonrainmakers in the art of
marketing professional services.
THE FIRM FIRST
NEEDED TO INCREASE its
capacity to handle more business. To get
employees to commit to taking on new
accountabilities and learning additional
skills to do this, it found a consultant
that could help them with a cultural
makeover.
MEYNERS PROVIDED
INFORMATION on finance,
operations, administration, marketing,
growth and business goals as well as its
specialty and niche market affinities to
help the consultant identify where
potential barriers to practice
development existed.
TO GET STAFF
WORKING TOGETHER the
consultant gathered feedback to refine
the firm’s core values and mission and
make sure everyone had a clear
understanding of what the firm’s values
are.
TO HELP DO THIS THE
CONSULTANT conducted training
named after and based on The 7
Habits of Highly Effective People,
by Stephen R. Covey. The
interpersonal and leadership skills the
seven-habits principles engender are the
underpinning for Meyners’ meeting new
demands for employee focus, smooth
communication and, ultimately, outreach
to clients.
THE TRAINING GAVE
EMPLOYEES processes and tools
to help them put the habits into
practice and hold themselves accountable
for using them. | PHAEDRA BROTHERTON is an
Arlington, Virginia-based business writer
who specializes in career, management and
workplace issues. Her e-mail address is Phaebro@aol.com
. MICHAEL HAYES is a senior editor on
the JofA . Ms. Hayes is an
employee of the AICPA and her views, as
expressed in this article, do not
necessarily reflect the views of the
Institute. Official positions are
determined through certain specific
committee procedures, due process and
deliberation.
This article should not be construed
as legal advice or a legal opinion on
any factual situation. As legal advice
must be tailored to the specific
circumstance of each case, the general
information provided herein is not
intended to substitute for the advice
of professional counsel.
|
any firms have a “rainmaker” or two
who bring in the bulk of new engagements. For
Meyners and Co., LLC, it was an arrangement that
worked just fine as long as its stars stayed put.
Alas, in June 1999 one of the firm’s major
business generators—a tax partner with a long
client list—retired abruptly after suffering a
disability. His departure highlighted a need that
had been brewing and led the firm to take a hard
look at how it would improve its pipeline to new
business. To win more work and find the resources
to service it ultimately would prove to be a
two-steps-forward, one-step-back saga of
determination. “Our partner group was
working at capacity,” recalls Meyners’ litigation
services partner Thomas Burrage, CPA. “Between
client management, the marketing we already were
doing, human resources issues and other business
matters, there was no time or energy left for any
additional clients or roles.” The firm decided it
would spread the responsibility of recruiting
clients by training and assisting its
nonrainmakers in “the art of marketing
professional services,” says Burrage.
What You Pay For
In 2001 there were 53,651
U.S. CPA offices with total receipts of
$38,601,265,000. Payroll as a percentage
of receipts was 39.3%.
Source: Employee productivity
statistics, BizStats.com
. |
A FALSE START
For its first try, Meyners turned to a
nationally known professional-services consultant,
which held an all-day marketing training session
for the firm’s partners and managers. As part of
implementing those newly acquired sales skills,
each participant was to describe his or her
activities and successes to the consultant, who
would record them and report progress back to the
group, thereby reinforcing what worked.
Unfortunately, because there was no real shift in
outlook, there weren’t many successes—and the
project failed. “The same individuals who
had been producing results prior to the training
continued to produce. Those who hadn’t didn’t
begin to,” says Burrage. In addition, the process
of keeping the consultant informed took time away
from other important business activities. Meyners
dropped the operation.
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
A year or so later, managing partner Bruce
Malott was at a seminar where a presentation by a
practice-development company caught his attention.
He and his colleagues took a closer look and
concluded that the Swansea, Illinois, Growth
Partnership (TGP) understood the challenges unique
to a CPA firm. “Its members were formerly
marketing directors of substantial firms,” Burrage
explains. Meyners hired the outfit to help the
firm design a plan to grow. The project is long
term and has been under way for more than a year.
TGP’s protocol involved first compiling
information about Meyners, its employees, clients
and systems. To do this, the consultant asked
Meyners to answer its preaudit kit, consisting of
a 60-item questionnaire for the managing
partner—which covered finance, operations,
administration and marketing—and a shorter set of
practice-development-related questions for the
other partners. The purpose of the preaudit was to
get a feel for the firm’s culture, identify “where
potential barriers exist” and prepare for a first
visit. Next, TGP went to Meyners to
interview partners and employees alike and learn
more about who they were collectively and as
individuals. The consultant also gathered data
about the firm’s growth and business goals as well
as its specialty and niche market affinities. The
next step was a retreat attended by Meyners’
partners and TGP to discuss the findings and take
an in-depth look at the firm’s competitors and
where it stood in relation to them.
LIGHT DAWNS
With the groundwork done, TGP presented its
marketing plan and strategies for growing the
firm. One tactic it suggested was to prepare a
list of prospective clients from a targeted
industry, and then contact them through a series
of three to four mailings prior to making a cold
call. Although Meyners liked the idea, it hit the
partners that this would bring in more work than
they could handle. It was then they fully realized
they didn’t have the time, the people or the
systems in place to put the consultant’s ideas
into action. There would be no quick fix.
In the give-and-take of the moment, the
partners aired their concerns about putting
pressure on themselves to bring in and service
more business. The consulting company recommended
that Meyners think about how to use the talent it
had in-house. Its advice: Develop a firmwide
system to encourage growth efforts by getting all
employees involved. Motivate and nurture staff to
play a more active role in marketing the firm’s
services and supporting the additional business.
Meyners needed to start by looking at two
important aspects of practice development. These
were
Specific firmwide marketing goals and
strategies, such as getting an engagement team to
work together to identify what other services a
client might need.
A system to train, inculcate firm
values in and create incentives for the staff
people who do the work and carry out the
strategies.
DO YOU TAKE THESE VALUES?
Meyners already had
developed its core values and mission (see
exhibit , below) with help from Practice
Development Institute (PDI), a Chicago-based
marketing/communications firm. In alphabetical
order, its core values are
Collaboration.
Commitment to balancing self, team
and client responsibilities.
Commitment to quality and responsive
customer service.
Commitment to the greater good.
Continuous and never-ending
improvement.
Creativity.
Fun.
Innovation.
Integrity.
Mutual respect, honesty and trust.
Profitability.
Risk taking. Meyners needed
to ensure that staff members embraced the firm’s
values and goals as their own to prepare for the
intense activity ahead. Making sure both staff and
partners clearly understood them was the first
step. Coral Rice, a TGP partner who specializes in
organizational development, says: “The core values
hung everywhere in the firm, but often there were
misunderstandings about what they meant. Everyone
had his or her own interpretation of how to act in
accordance with them.” Using e-mail to
communicate from her office in Illinois, Rice took
the staff through the core values. She sent them
out, one at a time, to all staff members,
requesting each to reply within a week’s time with
a definition of what that value meant to him or
her. Staff members also were asked to describe
behavior that demonstrated a particular core
value. Employees e-mailed their definitions and
descriptions back to Rice. For each value, the
consultant compiled the group’s input into a
unified definition with examples and ran them by
the partners for an OK. Applying the same
steps, the group worked out what acting on a core
value looked like at different levels in the
workplace hierarchy. For example, for
“collaboration,” staff came up with specific
behaviors for each level of employee, from
entry-level to partner.
Level 1 collaborative behavior was
expected of all employees, and was defined as
sharing knowledge or ideas about a particular task
or subject with another employee. That might be as
simple as a person at the front desk telling
another staff member when an express mail package
had been picked up.
Meyners and Co.’s
Corporate Values Poster
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Level 2 collaborative behavior
applied to midlevel or professional employees
(team leaders/senior accountants) and consisted of
delegating responsibilities and communicating
expectations to team members.
Level 3 collaborative behavior
applied to executive-level or partner-level
employees and consisted of activities to encourage
communication between departments, both to share
ideas and to minimize friction among staff. For
example, a partner might ask his or her managers
to consult with employees to plan the staff
members’ continuing education for the year. To
come to a decision, they would discuss what skills
the firm wanted strengthened as well as what each
employee wanted to learn.
LEARNING TO LIVE THE VALUES
Once Meyners’ people agreed on what the
firm’s core values looked like, the next step was
to internalize them. To help do this the
consultant conducted training named after and
based on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective
People, by Stephen R. Covey (Simon &
Schuster, 1989). The seven-habits principles of
personal and communal effectiveness are closely
aligned with the firm’s values, Rice says. The
interpersonal and leadership skills they engender
are the underpinning for Meyners’ meeting new
demands for employee focus, smooth communication
and outreach to clients. “The course
teaches processes and skills that allow
individuals to organize their lives using their
own set of values. Training our staff in these
skills and principles will help us develop our
desired corporate culture,” says Burrage. In
addition, when staff perceive themselves as
empowered, they clear away obstacles to doing an
outstanding job, he says. The habits—a
series of steps (each one is precursor to the
next)—are 1. Be proactive. 2. Begin
with the end in mind. 3. Put first things
first. 4. Think win-win. 5. Seek first
to understand, then to be understood. 6.
Synergize. 7. Sharpen the saw.
Periodically during the training, which
consisted of two one-and-a-half-day workshops, the
consultant divided staff into groups to discuss
the concepts being taught at the moment. This
brought together individuals from different parts
of the firm and expanded their sphere of contact
beyond the confines of their day-to-day
activities. The first session covered the
first three habits, which focus on personal- and
leadership-development skills. Employees learned
to develop an individual mission statement and a
process for managing time and setting priorities.
“After learning each habit, we discussed how to
apply it to our lives,” says Burrage. “Be
proactive,” for example, touched a nerve for
Terisa Blunt, CPA, a Meyners audit manager who
recognized a need for more assertiveness in her
daily life and incorporated habit one as part of
her mission. “Being proactive means focusing on
things I have influence over,” says Blunt. Staff
members could choose a reciprocal mentoring
relationship with another employee—tantamount to
an in-house personal coach—and Blunt has found the
reinforcement and feedback helpful. She says some
of her enthusiasm for the seven habits is because
they fit her outlook. Janet McHard, CPA,
supervising senior accountant, cites “put first
things first” (habit three) as most meaningful to
her for help in balancing day-to-day work, career
and family. Burrage, too, has found “put first
things first” particularly valuable for reminding
him to schedule time with his kids and permit
himself a weekly trip to the library. For
long-term goals, McHard says that “begin with the
end in mind” (habit two) helps her set priorities
and deal effectively with daily pressures.
The second part of the training covered habits
four through seven, which address how people
interact. To put them into practice, employees
participated in large and small group sessions,
playing a variety of games in teams and taking
part in role-playing exercises that emphasized
empathetic listening, team building and
collaboration. Finding personal
applicability in the habits helped persuade staff
that the cultural housecleaning they were going
through was more than a rhetorical exercise.
Stephen P. Comeau, JD and manager of litigation
and valuation services, had participated in
leadership seminars in the past and was a skeptic.
But the program presented techniques and insights
that “help you to focus on the right things in
trying to mature as an individual and as an
organization,” he concedes. The
seven-habits training was designed to give
Meyners’ employees tools to use on an ongoing
basis and procedures for “holding themselves
accountable for engaging in the process,” says
Rice. One practical exercise takes people through
a series of six steps to determine their
priorities, for example. It helps them connect
with their mission by reviewing their roles,
defining their goals, planning their weekly
activities and assessing how well they do each
week. When the training was completed,
Meyners asked participants to evaluate it
anonymously. Out of 65 people, only two or three
said they didn’t find it useful, Burrage says.
Overall, employees were optimistic about the
changes in the company and about their abilities
to contribute. One employee who has been with the
firm for several years and watched it grow to 80
people from 35 finds the training an antidote to
the distance that occurs when companies get
bigger. Others are encouraged that management has
exerted itself to get them involved. “In the past,
many of us have waited for change to come from the
top down. Now we’re each encouraged to help effect
it,” says Blunt. “Success is up to us.”
ALL ABOARD
Meyners appears to be
succeeding in getting its employees on board with
the changes. In January the partners held their
annual Focus Day to update staff on the firm’s
progress, its market position and strategic plan.
The staff’s reaction was positive, says Burrage.
Senior accountant and CPA Annie Grubelnik sees a
wide range of benefits and says, “With this, we
all can go down the same path together in trying
to improve our work and personal lives.”
But much still needs to be done. The firm let
everyone know that there would be demands to learn
fresh skills and take on new roles, such as
marketing services and responsibilities in new
niche areas. To accomplish this, the firm will
give employees the training they need to do their
redesigned jobs. These changes will require
modification of Meyners human resources systems to
evaluate and compensate staff for meeting the
objectives. “Our next step en route to
bringing in and servicing new business is to
finalize our job descriptions and develop
performance-review and pay-for-performance
systems,” says Burrage. “In my opinion, we’re a
much healthier organization as a result of the
efforts so far, but the proof will come when we
begin marketing and see profitability
improvements.” Meyners’ partners and staff will
put the new compensation system in place over the
next 12 months, and the JofA will take
another look at them then. |