CPA Practice Advisor

FEB 2012

Today's Technology for Tomorrow's Firm.

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THE CHANGE AGENT I The Perfect Blend: A Firm's Path to Ensuring Work-Life Balance If you haven't noticed, things are changing in the world of professional accounting. In fact, this change seems to be happening all over the world. Due to many things like technology, mobile work areas, work-ready coff ee shops, co-working facilities, and a younger work force, we are seeing T e Perfect Blend of our personal lives and our work take place before our very eyes. T is perfect blend seems to be something younger generations (or young-minded individuals) are more tuned in to. T e old guard still likes the rigid division between our work and our lives. To be sure, the perfect blend requires an open mind to approach your work and your personal lives in a whole new way. Why this change? T ose interested in the perfect blend get to live and work their passions. With the perfect blend, passionate individuals Jason Blumer, CPA.CITP Jason M. Blumer, CPA.CITP, CFE, is manag- ing shareholder of Blumer & Associates, CPAs, PC. He wears fl ip fl ops and jeans, says "dude" a lot, and often works in coffee shops with headphones blaring the latest Bloomberg podcasts (though he doesn't understand most of it). Jason loves new game-changing cloud technology and plays rock and roll too loud. His daily duties include consulting, process design, blogging, marketing and business development, innovative thinking, coaching, practice management, and acting as a change agent. Jason founded the THRIVEal +CPA Network to enhance and change the tax and accounting profession based on the foundational tenets of Community, Collaboration, Technology and Innovation. get to live their lives (maybe at a camp ground or on the beach) AND work at the same time doing something they love (like blogging, preparing tax returns or coaching with customers). These individuals think this is an amazing change in our world. "I get to prepare tax returns AND go camping at the same time? T at is awesome," they'll say. Can everyone live this life? Only if you are open to some serious changes in your work place. Your personal life is ready to receive this change, but the real change has to happen at work. Be ready to give up everything you thought was the way business should be conducted. When you hire individuals ready for the perfect blend, be prepared for them to ques- tion dress codes, being confi ned to one location for work, micro- management and even taking on the wrong kind of cus- tomers that don't also believe in the perfect blend. It sounds like I'm describing a bratty "millennial" employee that doesn't really know much about the real world. But maybe I'm describing someone that has lived their whole life using technology to blend their personal and work life. Maybe they are just wondering why older-modeled businesses are not changing to refl ect the reality of our world's ability to love our work and still live our lives. Should we listen? T e team at my fi rm now knows that our firm is an on-going experiment. They have now come to accept the changes I implement on an annual basis. I believe in the things I write about as The Change Agent. Here are some things we've tried to implement as we seek aſt er the perfect blend: 1 We got rid of our phones a while back. We don't have phones in our offi ce. Instead, every team member has an iPhone and the number you'll call actually routes through an online web- site, RingCentral.com (you'll also hear me singing the hold music). Was there hiccups when we did this? Yes, but we work through the issues because we have the underlying belief that we don't need phones anymore. We use Skype more than we use phones (and Skype is free). 2 We implemented a ROWE in our fi rm. A ROWE, or a Results-Only Work Environment, is an environment where you only care about the results that your team members deliver. Nothing else mat- ters. Dress codes, employment ag r eements, annual perfor- mance reviews, timesheets, and requirements to stay off of Facebook do not exist in our firm. A ROWE means I don't have to micro- manage people who are actually smarter than I am. T ey do their work because they love to do their work. And when we all buy-in to the vision of how our results can change our customer's lives, we simply get to work. And most of them get to work at home, because they don't want to come to the offi ce any- more. And most of our customers are found all over the country so we don't need to come to the offi ce anyway. T is leads to my third experiment... 3 We are going to close our offi ce on January 1, 2013. Since everyone does what they want in our fi rm, they work at home most of the time now. We believe that we don't need an office anymore. Again, we believe that. And when you believe something, you will typically act on what you believe. A lot of planning has gone into this move, and we have a lot of work to do to notify our customer base about this change. But more and more, our customer base is all over the country so they have never been to our offi ce anyway. T ey don't even need us to tell them that we are closing our offi ce. 4 We will not allow paper to leave or come into our offi ce starting January 1, 2013. Because of the way we want to work, and because we will not have an offi ce anymore, paper cannot be a part of our future. It must be elimi- nated. We believe that. We believe that so much that we are willing to say "you are not the right customer for us" instead of delivering paper to someone who might want paper. When you make radical changes, you have to really believe in what you are doing. Our at empts to eliminate paper from our fi rm thus far have been such a blessing, we believe that we can go all the way. No Paper will be part of our future. All of these changes do NOT come without problems or hiccups or things we did not anticipate. To be sure, we have to be ready to pivot and change as we innovate in this space. But we believe in what we are doing. We believe in the perfect blend, and we are willing to stake our fi rm's future on it. And that belief has united our small team more than anything else we have done. Because of our beliefs we have to be militant about the kind of customers we take into the fi rm. Only a certain kind of customer will enjoy the way we work. But when you take cus- tomers from all over the country, we are fi nding there are plenty to go around that believe the same things we believe. What is the perfect blend like in your fi rm? Does it exist? To be sure, for the right team member, the perfect blend will exist... but it may not be at your fi rm. T ey may start their own fi rm one day and create their own perfect blend out of their personal life and the work that they love so much. T e perfect blend allows our team members to love what they do, love how they do it and love the cus- tomers they serve. What could be bet er than that? February 2012 • www.CPAPracticeAdvisor.com 21

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