The top reason clients leave their CPA for another is that their “former CPA didn’t give proactive advice, only reactive service.” (Sleeter Group) Let that sink in for a minute. It’s interesting that a profession with so much knowledge finds itself falling short when leveraging it for practice growth. Maybe it comes down to workload and scalability. Maybe it’s related to the particular expertise of your staff. Or maybe your firm is too reliant on assuming that your clients will reach out for additional help or services.

Add to the mix that the third most common cause of client attrition is that they were referred to another firm by a trustworthy source. So, if it’s October and you haven’t reached out in any way to your client since tax season,

you can bet that their attachment to you and/or your services is tenuous at best. And if your engagement has consistently delivered bare-minimum service, all it takes to lose them is a hearty endorsement of a competitor from someone in their social circle.

TAKE THE FIRST STEPAccording to Wasp Barcode, accountants are ranked as the most important professional partner among businesses, outranking even attorneys, insurance agents, and bankers. Why is that important? Because your knowledge is wanted. It’s needed. And clients are willing to pay for it.

But if you don’t proactively interject with solutions and take a consultative approach,

THE ROLE OF PROACTIVITY

PRACTICE GROWTH THROUGH INITIATIVE

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you’re essentially asking your target market to examine your website, evaluate your entire service portfolio, match your services with their pain points, and initiate the conversation.

That’s asking a lot of anyone, much less a busy business owner. So what types of proactive measures can be taken? If you have trouble finding a starting point, it can help to think of your customers and ask yourself:

• How can I save them time? • How can I save them money? • What process improvements can I suggest? • How can I demonstrate my value over time? • How can I transform their cost centers into profit centers?

DO SOME WORK...FOR FREEPeople love freebies. They love them even more when completely unexpected and valuable at the same time. Imagine providing a quarterly review of a particular area of your clients’ business along with their next invoice. For example, imagine your client opening the envelope with your bill (or email attachment) and finding an optimization plan for their accounts payable operations. They weren’t expecting the gesture. But by taking this amount of proactivity, it shows that you’re not only attuned to their specific business, but capable of providing far more value to their business than maybe they assumed.

As trainer, blogger, and technologist, Seth David puts it, “You could probably increase your fees by 50% with your existing clients by taking one more hour per engagement and doing some analysis to help your clients with some of the guidance they are looking for.”

You’re in an interesting position in that you can use relatively basic Excel functions and some accounting software to quickly delve beneath the surface. You can even generate these as printed materials to be included in mailers, using what Sageworks calls the “Sticky note” method.

WHAT’S OBVIOUS TO YOU MAY EASILY ADDRESS THE ISSUES KEEPING

YOUR CLIENTS UP AT NIGHT.

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To you, this is a rudimentary visualization. But these simple exercises could provide just the kind of insight that keeps your clients awake at night. While this could be information you’re giving away, consider the long-term benefits: • By taking the role of proactive advisor, your clients’ perception of your capabilities will change dramatically.

• By offering a glimpse of your expertise at no charge, you open the door to conversations leading to service adoption and increased revenue per client.

• When your service is demonstrable, it makes it easier for clients to refer your services to colleagues.

ENSURE THAT IMPACTS ARE UNDERSTOODYes, it’s important to be proactive as a solutions provider, but it’s equally important to be proactive in the communication of the resulting impacts. It’s unreasonable to think that your clients have time to decipher accounting jargon or complex raw data.

The sheer amount of rates, ratios, models, formulas and categorizations can easily overshadow the larger point, which is business impact.

Essentially, it behooves you to be proactive in making certain your clients understand why they’re paying you.

SAMPLE CASH FLOW PROJECTION UPSELLAssuming you have visibility into your clients’ payables, receivables, terms, DSO, and expenses, you can visualize a cashflow projection in Excel. When put into an easily consumable format, this can shed enormous light into potential shortfalls or surpluses that would otherwise go unnoticed. From there, you can have a conversation to overlay your clients’ goals and initiatives for the next 12 months, using your projection to identify opportunities for:

• Cash savings (vendor discounts, payment terms, etc.)• Improved receivables policies • Pricing/margin optimization

This would also work as a historical view, where you can use the same data to have a retrospective conversation about how this type of information could have been helpful over the past 12-24 months.

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SHOW, DON’T TELLWhen it comes to demonstrating value to your clients, this couldn’t be more true.

How can one go about proactively showcasing results? Dashboards are a great format for this type of data, and are, in fact, a highly desirable service. While very few accounting firms offer this service, the requests for dashboards and business analytics rank only behind business planning and strategy (Sleeter Group).

Providing easily understandable and interpretable data on a regular basis can help to not only demonstrate results on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis, but can strengthen your relationship long-term with your clients as you develop a shared understanding of baseline performance, peaks and valleys over time.

When you cultivate that type of relationship, it becomes all the more difficult for your client to end the professional relationship and take their business elsewhere.

There are many dashboarding platforms available, including:

• Geckoboard • Klipfolio • Cyfe • Excel • Google Sheets • Accounting-specific tools, such as narrative reporting and projections by SageWorks

When data meets context, insight is possible. So wherever possible, make sure to take the proactive approach to ensure that your clients have a full and clear understanding of how accounting functions benefit their operation at large.

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WHEN DATA MEETS CONTEXT, INSIGHT IS POSSIBLE.