Wilson's Writings

We love this time of year. Everything is green and flowering, the weather’s great and the balance between work and the rest of life seems just right. We hope you experience summer the same way we do.

This period of renewal is the perfect time to think proactively about ways you can improve team work, be more efficient, touch more clients, close more business, or whatever it is you dream about enhancing in your practice. Most times, we wish we could make things better, but we don’t take the small, incremental steps that can lead us to that better place.

That’s why we’ve dedicated this issue to some small ideas that can make a big difference in your practice. Whether it be taking on a coach to help you pour jet fuel on your performance, implementing strategies to reduce the strain of work compression during your next busy period or developing a simple marketing calendar to focus your outreach efforts, this quarter’s issue will outline the steps you can take to really improve something this summer in addition to your garden, tan or golf handicap. For the record, given our work/life balance values, we strongly encourage you to improve at least one of those this summer, too.

So, now that the 4th of July holiday break is over, sit back, relax and enjoy this issue of Coaching Concepts knowing that the recipe for proactivity awaits you.

Good luck and happy summer!
Jen

Leadership Lessons:

The Value of Having A Coach

“I absolutely believe that people, unless coached, never reach their maximum capabilities.”

Bob Nardelli, CEO
Home Depot

At ConvergenceCoacing, LLC, we share this view, too, and that’s why we offer coaching services to our clients on both a firm and an individual basis through our Driving Your Success and Mapping Your Career Success programs. Several of the Convergence team members also employ individual performance coaches in one form or another outside of work.

Before we became coaching enthusiasts, though, we didn’t really see the value a coach could bring. This is probably because we thought we already knew, or at least should know, what we ought to be doing to develop ourselves or our business. And, we felt like we should just get to work “doing” those things instead of seeking coaching for help.

Sound familiar?

To better understand the benefits of having a coach, you need to first be able to answer the question, “What is a coach and what will they do when working with me?”

“[A coach is] part advisor, part sounding board, part cheerleader, part manager and part strategist.”

The Business Journal, April 2000

According to the Miriam-Webster Online Dictionary, a coach is a private tutor who instructs or trains a performer or a team of performers in fundamentals and helps direct a team’s strategy. In a business sense, a coach is someone who helps an individual professional realize their goals by honing their work strategies and tactics and enhancing their overall performance.

Usually, when you engage a coach to work with you, or a member of your team, they will help you to:

• Assess your ability in a particular area and identify your goals or ideals related to that particular area of your work or life;
• Develop a “game plan” to develop new skills, capabilities and habits and help generate new ideas that will enable you to meet your stated goals;
• Create a plan of action based on the ideas you’ve generated;
• Refine your plan;
• Implement your agreed upon action plan; and
• Develop an accountability mechanism that will enable you to keep your commitment.

After you better understand coaching precepts, it’s much easier to discern the value of having one.

A good coach will:

Follow professional guidelines that govern confidentiality and non-disclosure and allow you to develop an environment of trust that you may not be able to have with someone inside your firm or family;

Take the time to get to know you personally and professionally over time and will tailor their methods to suit your work style, needs and objectives without allowing your bad habits to sabotage your success;

Utilize proven strategies and tools they’ve developed in coaching others to guide you through a standardized process. That way, you won’t have to reinvent the wheel or waste time on the way to your goals trying things that may not work; and

Be committed to your chosen outcome, but unattached or removed from developing an outcome of their own. This detachment will enable your coach to guide you through the disappointment, frustration and confusion that can sometimes accompany your transformation and will help you gain the perspective that will enable you to experience “growing pains” without giving up on your true commitment.

Above all, a coach can help you focus on things that are important to you and your firm but always seem to take a back seat to the urgent, everyday realities of life. Your coach will help you set aside time each week or month to work on your goals or on your practice so that you can see genuine progress and results.

“Asked for a conservative estimate of the monetary payoff from the coaching they got, these managers described an average return of more than … six times what the coaching cost their companies.”

Fortune, February 2001

If you are truly interested in achieving growth and generating real results, take the time to learn more about our firm and individual coaching programs by contacting Jennifer Wilson at (402) 933-2900 or jen@convergencecoaching.com.

Practice Perspectives:

Summer's Here – Now What?

For many practitioners, the summer months mark a slow down in scheduled projects and an opportunity to take a breather from an intense first half. During this “less busy” time, we recommend that you consider taking a few proactive steps to plan for growth in the coming year. We believe that following these simple steps can help reduce the strain of work compression on your people and your practice as a whole.

Step One: Examine the Past

Gather your key managers and leaders and ask yourselves the following questions about the busy period just past:

• How did the first half go?
• What went well?
• What did not go well?
• Did you have enough people when you needed them? If not, what type of skill would have been most beneficial, when and why?
• What business processes seemed to inhibit your work? What can be done about these before season starts again?
• By conducting a “post-mortem” with multiple perspectives involved, you can learn from the past to ensure that next year’s busy period is improved.

Step Two: Commit to Improve

Develop an actionable plan based upon what you’ve learned from the period just ended. Consider investing in:

• Education for team members who would have been more productive if they’d been stronger in a particular technical skill, had a better grasp of the technology your firm uses or had stronger client management skills;
• Technology upgrades that include new software solutions, remote access for your staff members so that they can work from home and better balance their work and personal lives and increased network security to better protect the integrity of your sensitive data;
• Business process improvements that will enable you to better manage the work flows and ensure maximal productivity; and
• Marketing or sales programs that will enable you to maximize your value, accelerate cash or make improvements to your processes that could include pre-paid, fixed price engagements for production work like tax processing.
• For those actions that you commit to take on, make sure each one has a single owner in the firm assigned to see it through and a by-when date to guide your improvement process. When you make action plan development a regular part of your busy period ending, you’ll make continuous improvements each year and reap the benefits of these improvements through enhanced productivity and profitability.

Step Three: Look to the Immediate Future

Take the time to create a schedule of the projects you have committed to take on in the 2nd half of the calendar year. Map the projects against the calendar and then determine the amount of resource required to fulfill each project. Try to be as granular as possible – indicating the type of resource (administrative, junior, senior, partner/owner, etc.) and the estimated number of hours each person will be needed per project.

Use this detailed schedule to determine where you’ll have resource shortages, if applicable, so that you can plan to add that type of resource – whether temporary or permanently – before the need arises.

More likely though, your resource schedule will indicate that you will have capacity for more work than is sold in the months ahead. Because you’ll have done this planning at the resource level, you’ll be better able to gauge what type of work you should focus on selling to take advantage of your resource availability and you can spend your energies developing this work now. Or, if your culture calls for a “rest period” during these months, you can use this capacity schedule to plan CPE, vacations and even part-time work schedules to flow with the work you’ve already committed to perform.

Undertake these three steps now and feel much more in control of your practice performance and workflow during busy season and after. For more information about conducting post-busy season assessments and how to capitalize on your findings, contact Jennifer Wilson at jen@convergencecoaching.com or 402.933.2900.

Marketing Matters:

How a Simple Spreadsheet Can Improve Your Marketing Efforts

When we think of “writing” a marketing plan, most of us visualize a multi-page or lengthy document that takes a Masters in Marketing to write and to execute. At ConvergenceCoaching, LLC, we suggest that all of our clients begin their marketing planning efforts by developing a marketing calendar. And, we recommend they use our good friend, the Excel spreadsheet, to do so.

Most of us with financial backgrounds are familiar with Excel. Now you can apply your financial wizardry to the marketing realm by using this simple spreadsheet as a marketing calendar to schedule and plan your marketing activities. Developing a marketing calendar in this way will help you track and then improve your firm’s marketing investments by developing a simple method to measure your costs, ensure accountability and monitor success. For an example of a template marketing calendar you can use to get started, click on the link below:

http://www.convergencecoaching.com/private_csc/newcscdocs/marketing%20calendar%20template.xls

It would be nice if we told you that all you have to do to market successfully is create a marketing calendar. But, as nice as this would be to hear, it just isn’t true. Instead, you’ll undertake the step of creating your marketing calendar after you have done the necessary marketing planning, which includes:

• Completing a proper SWOT analysis;
• Developing your firm’s overall value proposition; and
• Identifying your key products and services and their respective target audience and value propositions, too.

For more information on these planning steps, which we’ve written about in the past, contact tamera@convergencecoaching.com or click on the link below for a sample SWOT Analysis template:
http://www.convergencecoaching.com/csc_docs/SWOT%20Template.2.03.doc

For the balance of this article, though, we will focus on the tactical implementation of creating your marketing calendar.

Creating Your Marketing Calendar

The building blocks of a successful marketing plan consist of the following steps, which are incorporated into your marketing calendar:

Step 1 – Define your objectives and goals
The first step is to identify and define the outcomes you are looking for from your marketing plan. Your objectives should be measurable, like the number of prospects you intend to generate and by when. By defining measurable objectives, you will be able to accurately assess the success of your marketing efforts.

Step 2 – Identify your ideal target market
The next step is to identify your ideal target client for each initiative that you intend to market around. As you begin to identify your ideal target, you will need to develop answers for the following questions:

• What type of client can best use the X service of your firm? By industry, size, geography, etc.?
• What difference does your firm make for these types of clients and how?
• What action do you want from them?

Once you have identified your ideal target, you will need to develop a list of prospects for your specific target markets. There are several ways to obtain prospects, including purchasing lists from your local Chamber of Commerce, Dunn and Bradstreet, InfoUSA and many other list brokers that can help match your criteria and allow you to purchase or rent a mailing list. Remember to consider your current clients that fit your ideal target market for services they may not be receiving from you.

Step 3 – Identify marketing activities
You’re almost at the finish line in developing your marketing calendar! While there are many, many marketing and lead generation activities from which you can choose, you’ll want to first start with two or three different activities and fully implement and measure those before moving on to additional activities. A few ideas to consider as your first priority include:

• Surveys;
• Teleprospecting;
• Web seminars, Client Briefings or Executive Briefings; and
• Newsletters or Email communications

Remember to inform your entire team about any marketing activities you are undertaking so that they can properly respond to questions when contacted and will know who to refer inquiries to within the firm.

Step 4 – Complete your marketing calendar
Now that you have identified your goals, target market and marketing activities, it’s time to complete your marketing calendar. Start with a simple Excel spreadsheet and begin filling in the information necessary to track and monitor your marketing activities. We recommend that your marketing calendar include the following columns including the:

• Type of marketing activity;
• Specific measures of success for that activity;
• “By When” date that will enable you to know when the campaign is scheduled to occur. This is particularly important to ensure that your activities are properly spaced and don’t “step” on one another time wise;
• Target audience to whom the activity is directed (existing clients, prospects, and the type of client as defined previously);
• Project owner within your firm – the person driving the activity and ensuring it is being executed on properly, within the budget and time frame;
• Project status, where the owner will update the status of their projects for regular reporting on marketing activities;
• Cost of the components of that marketing activity;
• Comments where the owner or others can include comments that might update the team on changes to the plans or reasons for budget or time line changes; and
• Results where your project owner or someone on the team will measure the activity by the number of opportunities it generated and any new engagements that can be traced to the activity.

Ensure that your marketing efforts are successful by assigning owners for each of the activities in your calendar. In addition, we recommend that you assign one owner, who can be a person in administration, to own the updating of the overall calendar and to whom all owners will input their status. This will help ensure accountability.

Finally, remember that your marketing plan is a living document that is impacted by changes in your firm, the economy, your competition, and especially by your actual experience with the activities you’re implementing.

We then recommend that you meet regularly, at least monthly, but more frequently at first, with all marketing activity owners and the overall owner of the marketing calendar to review the status of all activities on the calendar and discuss issues that arise, outcomes that occur and work together to regularly modify your plan based on experience. Taking this iterative approach to your calendar will enable you to manage your marketing investments wisely and migrate your investments to those things that really pay dividends for your firm.

For more information on developing a marketing plan or creating a marketing calendar, contact Tamera Loerzel at tamera@convergencecoaching.com or call 952.226.1780.

Successful Strategies:

Planning Your Sales Success – Tools to Support You

REDW Business and Financial Resources, LLC (REDW), the largest public accounting firm in New Mexico, believes in leveragability where possible and promotes a culture of communication and accountability. This is the premise on which Steve Cogan, CPA, bases his business development success.

Steve and REDW engaged ConvergenceCoaching, LLC in our individual coaching program, called Mapping Your Career Success™, which supports Steve in:

• Creating a vision for his career;
• Identifying how he can measure his success; and
• Creating a framework for developing his priorities and being accountable to his vision.

Steve has access to a coach who supports him in taking his career and his audit practice to the next level. This first required Steve to assess his current performance and the performance of his practice, as well as to gain feedback from others in the firm as to where they thought he should focus his energies. Then, he developed a set of goals to achieve during his time in the program. “Doing this has allowed me to refocus my energies on the things that are important to me – and to the audit practice – versus spinning my wheels on things I can’t necessarily impact,” says Steve. “I have a renewed commitment that allows me to be more effective, and the results speak for themselves.”

Once this was done, Steve and his coach worked together to develop and then implement some new management tools and processes into his everyday work life. First, they created a Personal Marketing Plan (PMP) to identify Steve’s core marketing objectives, his ideal target client profile in various industries and to document his marketing activity commitments for the coming months. Then, Steve began addressing these commitments each month, moving his marketing outreach efforts from internal cross selling, to existing client outreach and networking, to “colder” prospect outreach.

Steve also tailored the ConvergenceCoaching, LLC pipeline template tool, which is a simple Excel spreadsheet (click here for a template: http://www.convergencecoaching.com/csc_docs/pipeline.xls) that enabled him to begin tracking all of his sales opportunities, including both prospects and new service opportunities for existing clients of the firm. Steve tracks prospects for the Audit and Consulting group as well as those he has sourced for other firm departments – an area where he has had particular success.

In addition to maintaining a pipeline of all his opportunities, the pipeline updating and review process provides Steve a consistent method of accountability and a way to definitively track success.

Another component of the Mapping Your Career Success process is ongoing monthly coaching calls where Steve reviews his pipeline of opportunities and other agreed upon actions with his coach. This accountability enables Steve to consistently move opportunities forward as well as provides him the ability to identify and measure his achievements. His successes range from a large multi-year audit engagement worth over $100,000 annually to simple bookkeeping and audit services for $10,000 that were on the “pipeline” for some time and are now closed. In addition, he has referred over $50,000 in closed business to other groups during the time he has been working his program.
“I have incorporated my pipeline into regular communications with my other partners so that they can see the accomplishments we are achieving in the audit practice,” says Steve. “It lets me know that I’m on track and my partners can begin to see how the process works and also look for areas where we should be leveraging each other on similar opportunities that they might be working on.”

Steve has also implemented other sales tools and processes including the development of a proposal template that is being incorporated in other areas of the firm. He also has an ongoing commitment to “client care” lunches where he meets with a minimum of one existing client a week and three to five network contacts per month to cement his relationships and uncover any potential service opportunities that may exist.
To develop a sales culture of accountability in your firm, a leadership commitment must be established. The benefits Steve has realized include:

• Providing a consistent method for managing his sales opportunities;
• Beginning to smooth peaks and valleys in activity for the audit practice; and
• Increasing his ability to predict resource needs and overall revenue projections.

To find out how you or your firm could benefit from a Mapping Your Career Success individual coaching program or discuss the process of implementing sales process tools and pipeline meetings in your firm, contact Tamera Loerzel at tamera@convergencecoaching.com or 952.226.1780.