FREE audio CD: "A World Of Choice - Now You've Passed The UFE, What's Next?"

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An hour long discussion with Steve McIntyre-Smith about all your career options now you're about to become a CA.

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• the firm you work for


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Topics covered include:

• Should I stay where I am or move on?


• Do I stay in public accounting or go into industry?


• Do need to work for a large firm, mid-tier firm or a smaller firm?


• Where do I want my career to go in the long run?


• How do I get to Partner level?


• What should I expect when I get there?


• Show me the money!


• What can I expect to earn as my career develops?


• What about specializing?


• Do I need to pick a specialty right now or can it wait?


• What if I stay where I am for now, what can I expect?


• and much, much more!

A priceless aide to helping you see through the fog that surrounds the newly qualified CA.
Listen to an objective opinion from Canada's leading public accounting expert, Steve McIntyre-Smith, and then you be the judge!

Available December 2008.

To reserve your FREE copy, Click here, and include your full name, employer, delivery address for us to mail the CD to, and a daytime telephone number.

In order to receive this, you must have written the UFE in the last 2 years, that is why we need you to confirm your employer - we will NOT be calling your employer - but we will verify your status online with the Institute and our own database.

When sending your registration email, please include your name, the firm you work for, work address, daytime telephone number and home address for delivery of the cd. Inclomplete registrations will be ignored.

Click here to ensure you get your FREE CD.

“How can my small firm compete with the big four on salaries?”

It’s a good question, and one I am frequently asked by client firms who engage my firm to find professional staff for them.

In actual fact, in today’s market, the smaller practitioner is often not as disadvantaged as they might, at first, assume, particularly at the lower end of the salary scale.

Indeed, some of my clients, public accounting firms just like yours, have decided to give themselves a distinct advantage by paying more than the big four.

In the end, it usually doesn’t cost any more than paying market rate, as someone who knows they are getting paid more than they would usually be paid elsewhere often works that little bit hard and that little bit smarter. The combined effect can sometimes be that their effective cost per hour to the firm is similar to an ‘average’ team member putting in an ‘average’ week.

In addition to this, smaller firms are often more flexible as they can accommodate the needs of ‘return to work Moms’ by offering flexible hours or remote access to their system allowing them to work from home a couple of days a week.

It also depends on the type of environment you’ve worked hard to create at the firm.

A big, faceless, corporate firm can sometimes feel cold and clinical. Partners in bigger firms can sometimes treat their clients as if they were their own personal piggy banks – generating fees when in need of cash.

Contrast that relationship to the one in a smaller firm, where the receptionist knows the names of the clients children (often because they share the same school or hockey team) and where the person answering the phone knows which client is calling before they’ve said a word, or before they look at caller display, just y the way they’re breathing!

In a smaller firm, there tends to be a strong feeling of community among the staff and even with the Partners, as they all work closely together.

At the bigger firms, some Partners might not even know the names of some of their staff!

All of this adds up to create a real team environment, where everyone’s contribution is valuable.
And because everyone’s contribution is valuable, all staff gets recognition for their efforts during the year.

The anonymity that sometimes comes with a bigger firm again can often work against them, as people want to be recognized for their good work and effort. In huge offices with several hundred staff it’s sometimes difficult to get noticed, no matter how good your work is.

Let’s look at a typical example. Let’s call the candidate Michael.

Michael was a hard working CA in a national firm who worked for a Partner who was, to put it mildly, something of an egomaniac.

Michael had some great ideas, and, of course, he would share them with the Partner he worked directly with. However, even though several of his ideas were adopted as firm policy, Michael never received any credit for them. He didn’t receive any positive comments about these in his annual review either.

After a couple of years of this happening, Michael raised this point with the Human Resources manager conducting his annual review, who was shocked that Michael would be so bold as to claim some of his partner’s great ideas were in fact, his!

Despite Michael’s protests at his innocence, he became branded as a trouble maker!

Well, suffice to say that Michael decided to leave the big four firm that had been his employer for eight years, and he joined a smaller outfit. He quickly became a key figure in the firm’s management team, and after just three years, was recently promoted to Partner.

Now, of course, not all Partners in big firms take credit for their team members’ ideas, but it’s not the first time I have heard of this happening either.

Other ways smaller firms can compete with the bigger firms is the intimate relationships we are able to develop with our clients in smaller firms. We tend to know them much better, become involved in their business decision making more closely and some of our clients even become friends.

Rarely does a smaller firm have to implement lay-offs. Not so with the bigger firms. When a multi-million dollar audit is lost, the Partners are faced with a choice:

· Keep the firm staffed at its present rate, despite a lack of work and find new business to fill the void, or
· Let go enough staff to cover the losses and re-hire later if they find new business.

It’s not an easy choice for some.

Even though they may prefer not to let people go, they have personal financial commitments which they would like to continue to be able to honour (kids at university etc) and so more often than not the axe falls on the last few hundred recruited not so long ago.

But what happens if they let too many go? Although they may preach ‘work/life balance’ few actually practice what they preach, and thus the team working for them feels obliged to arrive early and work late too.

The smaller firms rarely find themselves in this sort of predicament.

Another point where smaller firms win big, is in the variety of work enjoyed by staff. I have seen several brand new CAs at one of the large firms (who will remain nameless) not know what to do with a ‘Quickbooks’ file, because their entire career has been spent auditing Billion-dollar corporations, and they have only seen payable for six months on one audit, then onto fixed Assets for three months at the next client and then payables for three months at the next.

This type of CA is often, in my humble opinion, dangerous. They simply are not well rounded enough to be any use in a smaller firm, and should they make a move into one, they will probably struggle for the first few months.

I am old enough to remember the hand written extended trial balance.

The invention of a psychopathically sick mathematical genius, it really did ‘sort men out from the boys’ (or the women from the girls) as far as identifying who had a real grasp of double-entry bookkeeping and who did not.

I fear that some new CAs wouldn’t know where to start on smaller client files and as far as ‘T’ accounts are concerned, well, it might as well be in Greek!

Most people who ‘grow up’ in smaller firms are better technicians at the stuff that really matters for the owner-managed client. Yet it is a selling point for why a candidate should join a smaller firm that is rarely capitalized upon.

So, if you run a smaller practice, and you’re feeling insecure about ‘selling’ your firm to a candidate, shake of those insecurities and remember all the great things that led you into your role today:

· Work/Life Balance is more likely to be attained in a smaller firm
· Paying higher salaries but working a little smarter can mean everyone wins
· A better all round grounding in accounting can be achieved in a smaller firm
· You get to know the clients far better and build real relationships in smaller firms
· You get to know the Partners at smaller firms better, and they get to know you too
· Flexibility in working from home or flexi-hours is more achievable
· Great training for future Partners
· First-hand experience in a wider range of projects
· Better tax experience compared to an audit staff member in a bigger firm

I could (and often do) go on, but I think you get the picture by now.

While sometimes the bigger firms simply write bigger cheques, money isn’t everything.

There is no real reason why a smaller firm cannot compete on salary alone, but they can also create a more compelling case for joining them than a bigger firm could – unless the candidate simply wants to stay in audit for the rest of their career.

A Wake Up Call For The Profession.

953.

A scientific formulae? Last week’s winning lottery numbers? Part of a phone number? Or, the meaning of life?

Nope.

It’s the number of successful UFE writers in Ontario this year. In all of Canada there were 2,327 successful candidates.

It seems the number of new UFE passers gets smaller and smaller each year, or at best has levelled out to a similar number to last year.

Why is it that such a rewarding profession that offers such variety of projects and interesting clients to work with cannot produce sufficient numbers of new CAs to meet demand?

Of course, a large number of these new CAs, when they get their thirty months experience in and become members, will move out of public accounting and into posts in industry, local government, academia, or apparently anything else but public accounting.

It’s a chronic problem that is getting worse with each year.

The CICA’s own statistics tell us that 26% of all members are in small to medium sized practices. Of these members, 46% are aged 55 or more.

So what does that tell us?

In ten years time there will be a dramatic increase in the number of practitioners looking to exit public accounting, at the same time when there are fewer and fewer potential buyers (CAs with around ten years experience – the typical stage at which members are starting to think about buying a block of fees or a practice).

So, remember back to your Economics 101 course. What happens to price when supply goes up and demand goes down?

Yes, it drops like a grand piano from a twelfth floor balcony!

Not good for those readers building a practice with a view to exiting in 10 years time.

I think the root cause of the problem is how we market the profession to University students and also to clients, and the public at large.

As Partners, many also set a poor example to their staff; in early, the last to leave, working weekends, stress-related illnesses, second or third marriage, and then they turn around to their seniors and say ‘If you play your cards right, one day all this can be yours!’

Little wonder, then that many decide that their future is not in public accounting long term.

It’s also connected to how accounting professionals market themselves.

When asked what they do for a living, many CAs will respond ‘I’m a CA’. Such a typical response doesn’t even answer the question! ‘I’m a CA’ is what you are, not what you do!

Better to answer that question with something a little more interesting, or head-turning.

‘I’m a tax cheat’ might not get the blessing of your professional body, but it will certainly get the interest of the person asking the question. There must be a better way.

If you work with owner-managers with the underlying purpose of helping them build their business so that they can sell out for a million dollars or more, then maybe you could answer the dreaded question ‘what do you do?’ with: ‘I help make millionaires!’

Now, as a client, you’d have my interest!

We, as a profession, are competing directly with Engineering and Sciences, Oil & Gas, The Law, Dentistry and many other career options for today’s ‘bright young things’.

And when compared to these, the ‘stereotypical accountant’ image we have inadvertently created doesn’t look very exciting. Indeed it looks how it is meant to – boring.

I say it is time for dramatic action.

It’s time to shake off the shackles we have created for ourselves.

It’s time to re-engineer our firms, how we work with clients, the value we add to businesses, the hours we put in and how we’re compensated for our efforts.

Of course, a part of our work is of a mundane nature. It’s a part of the job, but it doesn’t ALL have to be mundane.

I am very fortunate to work with some very visionary firms, who have worked very hard to create an environment of ‘fun’ at the office and an OAF philosophy (Out At Five).

Indeed, at the time of writing this, I just returned from a client who has a massive staff room in their Ottawa office, where they have a full sized pool table and have office pool tournaments, and they have a ping-pong table for the staff to boot. But even they have difficulty in attracting high calibre talent.

If firms like this struggle (which was why I was there in the first place) just imagine how ‘ordinary’ firms cope.

My point is that from our professional bodies right down to the new entrant to public accounting, we have a duty to recreate a new public image of ourselves, for the sake of the future of our great profession.

Accounting is exciting, it offers variety, it offers financial security for its practitioners at all levels and it’s, yes, sexy!

My challenge to you as we start 2008, whether you’re the president of the Institute or a new student is this; what are you prepared to do to reposition the accounting profession as an exciting career option that will attract quality people in greater numbers and start, ever so slowly, to turn the public perception of accounting around, so that it is seen as a thoroughly rewarding, exciting and varied calling that offers unlimited potential to those who choose to enter?

Passed The UFE? What’s next?

Passed the UFE this year? Or expect to do so before the results come out?

Not sure about what your options really are?

Unsure about what the right salary level is for you now that you’ve qualified?

What if you still have some hours to put in before you can get the designation?

Relax the answers lay within this column, but first the bad news. Let’s assume you’ve passed, congratulations. Now the hard work begins!

‘What?’ I hear you say. ‘I thought passing my exams would be the end of my studying days!’ And indeed they might be. But for those who want to really develop their career, more learning lays ahead, and not just from textbooks this time, but in the ‘school of hard knocks’ too.

I’m sure you have a number of questions right now, as you face the first real crossroads of your career.

It can be a confusing time.

Headhunters calling you left, right and centre, with messages about tempting offers in industry?

But is industry really going to give you the career options you want, or would you be better off staying in public accounting?

What if you’ve trained with a big firm, what about moving to a mid-tier or smaller firm?

It can be a bewildering time for the freshly minted CA, and we understand that.

So, what does it mean now that you’ve passed the UFE?

Well it can mean the world to most newly minted CAs.

However, if you have yet to complete your 30 months practical experience, you need to get that ‘little matter’ seen to. You will also want to ensure that you have the required variety of experience (enough audit hours, etc) in order to qualify for membership.

That may mean staying put for a little while, and patience truly is a virtue in that case. However, we recently placed a UFE graduate, who had a massive number of hours shortfall in audit experience, in order for then to get the required hours and thus secure their designation (and the right to practice, should they choose to later on).

Public accounting can be a truly rewarding, interesting, diverse and financially worthwhile career,

Whether you intend to get some more experience and eventually branch out on your own, or if you intend to become a partner at your existing firm, there are substantial rewards awaiting you.

At this point in your career it might be tempting to jump into industry and escape tax season, earn a little more cash, and work fewer hours. You may well be offered a modest increase in your base salary (5 to 10%) after the results come out, or even a bonus payment, depending on which firm you work for and what the culture is there, or passing the exams might be a springboard to a promotion on the not-too-distant horizon. Either way, things will definitely start looking up for you. Then there is the tempting call of industry.

However, going into industry can actually limit your earnings potential later on in your career.

On our recruiting website, www.ifindcas.com, there is an article entitled, ‘Beware the Sirens’ (first published here, in The Bottom Line, June 2006) which goes on to explain why, so I won’t repeat that here.

Suffice to say that I now see a number of really good CAs who want to return to public accounting but now face a tough time getting back in.

The longer they are away from public accounting, the more difficult a return becomes.

Challenges that face the returning CA include:

· Tax changes
· Software Issues & Competencies
· Salary requirements of a senior person returning to a more junior level

So think long and hard about where you intend your career to take you before making any major changes, and seek out the advice and opinions of trusted sources.

Also, a few words for those whose names do not appear on the UFE pass list… do not become discouraged. I have seen many a great CA who, if truth be told, didn’t pass the UFE first time around. Just take this as, not the end of the world, but a fresh chance to study that little bit harder, or that little bit smarter, and bounce back stronger than ever before.

They say the key to success is being able to bounce right back after failure. How high are you going to bounce?

Cutting A Deal When There’s No Natural Successor.

One of the things I often find myself discussing with practitioners is succession planning.

It seems it’s all too easy to ‘put it off’ to another day.

Many, especially sole practitioners, seem to believe that one day they’ll decide to sell their practice and retire to the sun. That may well be so, but in order to realize the maximum value for their hard work over the years, and to pass-on that value to the new owner(s) of the firm, a lot of preparation work has to be done.

In many cases, the value of the practice will be dependant upon the amount of business that the acquiring firm retains, usually over a period of time of between three to five years.

So, it’s vital to make sure that the people taking over your clients have similar values, similar outlooks and values as you. After all it is your own ‘style’ of practising that kept the clients happy all these years, isn’t it?

So what are the key factors to consider in order to have something of real value to sell? Here are a few pointers:

• Quality working paper files – incoming potential buyers will want to examine your files and consider potential claims that they were not responsible for creating. Good working paper files is one of the cornerstones to a successful sale.
• Providing an awesome service experience to clients – again, incoming potential buyers will want to know that they are not looking at a ‘high risk’ block of fees.
• Excellent history. What did you bill client ‘X’ last year? And the year before? And the year before that? Any major fluctuations could be a red flag, so have your client history at hand to explain any such occurrences.
• WIP – too much? Too old? What is the right balance? This will be a major component part of your discussions and if there is any doubt about the quality and recoverability of WIP, you might find yourself having to bill what you can for it directly to clients you are then asking to give the new owners a try.
• Write offs. These come in two distinct flavours:1. Time2. BillingsNeither taste that great. A good recovery history and few bad debts will go along way to verifying your claim that you have a good set of clients.
• Staff. Clients usually build a good relationship with someone special to them at your office. In a sale, clients want to be assured that there will be continuity in service and the people that they have worked with for so many years will still be around.It is often wise for the incoming practitioner to try to keep all staff of the old owner at least for the first few years.
• Timing. Many deals tend to happen in the fall, just because during tax season few are prepared (or able) to devote much time to discussions with prospective purchasers when they have five hundred tax returns to steam through. If that sounds like you, NOW is the time to start to think about finding a buyer.
• Culture. It is often overlooked as a ‘softer’ issue, but it is critical that clients continue to be treated in the same (or better) manner as they have been accustomed to over the years.Finding a firm to succeed you who have similar values and culture can be a full time job in itself, so time invested in frank and open discussions with third parties will pay dividends after the deal has closed.

All in all, it often takes between 6 and 12 months to close a deal, even in today’s market, where there are way more buyers than sellers.

The best option is to ‘grow your own’ successor by taking in a partner or senior manager with high potential 2 to 5 years before you plan to retire, allowing them to build relationships with key clients and when you are ready, they will be an established part of the firm, rather than the ‘new kid on the block’.

This means paying excruciating attention to detail when hiring, being open about your plans and the timing of events, and probably being prepared to take a cut in income as the new recruit builds momentum so that you can start to ‘take your foot off the gas’.

Unfortunately, for reasons of:

- Lack of available talent
- Reluctance to take a cut in net profit share
- Reluctance to relinquish sufficient control
- Or all three, many sole practitioners miss a great opportunity.

I cannot tell you just how much fun this type of can be for me. I get to se a whole range of different accounting firms in totally different situations, each with a different solution, but the solutions only start to happen when you take action.

Please, don’t leave it too late.

Work/Life Balance – The Impossible Dream?

I don’t know how many readers might have fallen into some of the traps I used to when I was in public accounting, but here are a few scenarios I fell prey to.

Let’s see how many of them might be familiar to you;

It’s 5.15pm on a Wednesday. You promised you’d be home in time to have dinner with the family before going to your youngest child’s piano recital. The phone rings, it’s a client with a desperate need.

Instead of saying ‘I’ll call you back tomorrow with an answer’, you press on and work through their problem with them.

Suddenly it’s 7.30pm and you arrive at the church hall just in time to see your budding family musician walk back to their seat after giving their performance.

The atmosphere later that night isn’t a pleasant one, and ‘Dinner is in the Dog!’

It’s a Thursday before a long weekend and you and the family are due to go to the cottage on Friday morning to get a jump-start on the traffic heading north.

A new client comes into the office with four years financial statements and tax returns that desperately need attending to, otherwise the CRA are going to foreclose on their home.Your staff are all fully committed on other projects, so you pull an ‘all-nighter’ and make a start on the first couple of years financial statements.

Before you realize it, it’s Friday afternoon and you end up eventually joining the family at the cottage on Sunday morning.

Or how about this one; It’s Saturday morning in early April and you’re due at an old friend’s wedding at 2pm. You go in to the office, as would be the ‘norm’ just to do ‘a couple of hours’ and get carried away.You end up missing the entire wedding, grab a hamburger on the way to the reception (which you eat in the car while driving) and eventually turn up, without your wedding gift, half way through the evening reception around 9pm.

What about the play-off tickets you have for the big hockey game? They drop the puck at 7pm, but you’re not there. A staff member needed some guidance and mentoring around 5pm – they’re struggling with the tax consequences of the 31 journal entries that came out of your review that afternoon - and three hours later you’re both still at the office?

I could go on, but by now I’m sure you’ve spotted at least one of the types of issues that tend to be something of an ‘occupational hazard’.

The point is that we are often in a reactionary mode. Something happens and all bets are off for the rest of that day.

It’s a part of the nature of the beast that is public accounting.

However, these days, our staff are looking for work/life balance, and as partners, we often do not set a good example.

Some of the above scenarios give the wrong type of message to today’s team members.

Back in the day, the modus operandi was ‘our clients needs come first, our families needs second’. But that simply doesn’t work these days with the Gen Xers and Gen Yers that adorn our hallways.

Our staff are our biggest asset, and our biggest asset likes to go home at night.

In my recruiting work with many of the GTA’s brightest talents, I still hear stories of 10, 12 or even 14 hour days at some firms.

I still hear of the raised eyebrow from one partner whose office opens out onto reception (purposely chosen so she can see who is coming and going and when) with the attitude of “What, going already? Lost interest have we?”

Ladies and gentlemen, this is no longer an acceptable practice.

Sure we are all expected to work hard. Sure long hours are the norm in most firms during tax season, and yes we are still expect to ‘earn our stripes’. It’s just the price has changed over recent years.

In fact, having a life outside of work has been proven to produce more relaxed staff, more relaxed (or ‘rested’) people are usually more productive during their working day.

If they’re more productive, they should also be more profitable people for the firm.

The more profitable staff should be tomorrow’s superstars, and they’re not necessarily the ones who put in the longest hours.

Indeed, I have heard stories of staff playing solitaire on their computer for three hours, just so they’re not the first to leave at night.

So how do we go about attaining the illusive ‘work/life balance’?

Well it’s not easy, as old habits really do die hard. But it is possible. As in most things, good leadership starts at the top. Partners have to be seen to be getting some form of balance in their lives.

If a partner is sometimes all packed up and ready to go home at five o’clock, that should send the message to the rest of the team that this is now an acceptable practice.

Indeed, I work with some firms who set chargeable hours target for partners at 400 to 600 hours per year.

At $300 an hour, that’s $120,000 to $180,000 in revenue generated from their time over the year. But what if they’re value-billing for their work? They might be able to generate twice those amounts, just by pricing their services carefully and choosing which projects they work on wisely.

Here are some simple tips that might help you get back on track and work towards a better balance;

- Always ask yourself ‘what is the most valuable thing I could be doing right now, and is that what I’m actually doing?’ If it isn’t, delegate the task in hand to someone lese and get one with a higher value project.

- When a client calls in a desperate state, ask yourself ‘Is this Urgent or Important, or both?’ Only drop everything if it’s both. If it’s urgent, someone else could do it. If it’s important but not urgent, it can wait. These unimportant but urgent issues are often the ones that side-track us and lengthen our days unnecessarily.

- Make sure you have great people behind you as a backup. ‘Bench strength’ has been around a long time in professional sports, and it’s coming to a public accounting firm near you!

- Pick a certain day and try to arrange things so that every week, on that day, you are out at five. An OAF (out at five) day can then filter through the firm.

- Avoid taking work home, or accessing your system from home, after dinner for example, on these days too, and devote the later afternoon and early evening to ‘quality family time’.

- Get an outside interest that requires one or two evening’s commitment every week. Think back to your younger days. What did you want to be when you grew up when you were a kid? Maybe there’s an interest there that will excite you and breathe new life into you. As an example, I always wanted to be a rock star, so I took up the guitar in my late 20’s. I used to play in a rock band that took quite a lot of time commitment from me, but it was something I just loved doing.Maybe there’s something similar that you can do to help you have a reason to leave the office early from time to time.

- Communicate throughout the office that you want people to have a life, that ‘all work and no play makes Jack (or Jackie) a dull boy (or girl)’!

- Read. Read lots! There are hundreds, nay, thousands, of really great business books published every year. Try to read one good book a month, then build it up to one a week. Become a stranger to the biggest income suppressor ever created… the television.

- When you get home, turn off the TV and, before getting back to your book, actually talk to your family. Talk about things you want to do and places you want to go at the weekends, and make plans to actually do them.

Hire great people with outgoing personalities and pre-existing outside interests and hobbies. This sometimes has a positive rub-off effect on other team members.

- Create a firm soccer team, golf foursome, hockey team or other sporting team that can help build team spirit within the firm and creates a competitive spirit. I created a five-a-side soccer team in my firm and we played clients, banks, law firms and so on, great for team spirit but also great for business development!

- Try closing the office at lunchtime on the Friday of a long weekend. Your staff will appreciate the extra time and if you make this a policy, the lost chargeable time will be recuperated over the year in additional effort, I promise you.

- Set realistic chargeable hour targets for staff. Actually, it is better to set revenue goals over chargeable hours, as revenue is directly bankable, the hours we put into some projects are never fully recovered.

- Make yourself get out of the office at least twice a week for lunch. Take a client, banker, lawyer, staff member to lunch and build better relationships.

- Encourage staff to use all their vacation days. A well-rested team is a more productive team. That goes for you too. A partner should be taking six weeks a year off to keep fresh and energetic at work.

- Promote people from within wherever possible. It’s great for morale, it’s your best succession plan possible, and it helps attract other ambitious people to the firm if you can demonstrate a track record of making people partners.

So, there’s a few tips to get you started. It’s far from comprehensive, but initiating some of these ideas will surely set you down the path towards getting some work/life balance, and that can’t be a bad thing. Can it?

For those who want some suggested reading, here’s a few great books that are essential reading for any serious practitioner, no matter what level you’re at right now:

• Good To Great, by Jim Collins
• Build To Last, By Jerry I. Porras & Jim Collins
• The E-Myth, by Michael Gerber
• The Professional’s Guide To value pricing, by Ron Baker, CPA
• Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi
• Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
• How To Work A Room, by Susan RoAne
• Why Entrepreneurs Should Eat Bananas, by Simon Tupman
• First Among Equals, By Patrick J. McKenna & David H. Maister
  
  These should get you started.
  
  Oh, and by the way. NEVER read a good business book without either a tape recorder or a pen and paper to hand. It’s amazing how many great ideas will jump into your mind about how you could improve something at the office when reading a good business book.
  
  Capture those ideas by recording them or writing them down so as not to lose them forever.

Dealing With A Counter Offer

Something got Simon curious to see if the grass really is greener on the other side, and he’s taken steps in that direction; taking an unsolicited call from a head-hunter, chatting with them about his career to date in public accounting, when he earned is designation, and his career goals and objectives.

That frank and productive discussion evolved into meeting the recruiter for an initial interview for them to assess his suitability for some of the roles they are working on.

The interviews seemed to have gone well, and the day after his second interview with a progressive firm, the recruiter called him to make an offer on behalf of her client.

At first the adrenaline rush kicks-in and Simon accepts the offer on the spot. Even after a day or so, while references are being taken up, he is confident that he has made the right decision, and the recruiter called him back to say the references have checked-out well, and the offer is now firm.

A starting date is agreed upon, and Simon prepares his resignation. Not wanting to leave his present firm short-handed during busy season, he gives four weeks notice and plans to start his new position on 1st May.

In tendering his resignation, Simon sat down with his boss, Terry, a partner with whom he has worked for the last five years, and basically spills his heart out.

He let his partner know why he had decided to leave, citing three main issues:

A lack of opportunity to advance – It has been four years since he was promoted to manager, yet apparently no room for another senior manager in the firm.
Boredom with dealing with the same clients for the last four years with the same simple requirements – one Notice To Reader file and tax return after another.
Disillusioned at working for one of the firm’s Partners (who treats Simon like his own personal door mat and really takes him for granted, often making totally unreasonable demands).

On hearing Simon’s ‘gripes’, Terry expressed genuine concern. Terry had high hopes for Simon, seeing him as genuine ‘partner material’ and decided to do something about this situation.

Terry asked Simon to sit on his resignation for just a couple of days while he digests what Simon had just told him and considers what actions he could take to try to remedy the situation and thus make life better for Simon at the firm in order to try to keep him at the firm.

The next day, Terry approaches Simon and invites him out to lunch to discuss some exciting developments.

During their lunch, Terry confides that the firm had been thinking of promoting him to Senior Manager, and they have decided to implement that effective 1st May.

The firm has also decided to move some of one of the Partner’s clients over to Simon to manage on his own, as his own clients, which will also provide him with a wider variety of work.

And finally, Simon would no longer have to work for the ‘troublesome’ partner anymore.

Just to make it all too good to be true, they are also offering a raise of $12,000 a year if Simon were to withdraw his resignation and stay on.

Simon doesn’t know what to say.

All his dreams seem to be answered – this is just what he has been waiting for, and now he finds himself in a quandary.

Simon calls the recruiter who he has been working with and explains the new development.

Now this is the stage at which a really good recruiter will show their true colours.

The recruiter, of course, wants to keep her client happy and fill the open position, yet, she also wants the candidate to make the best decision for their career.

At this point, the recruiter should ask Simon:

“Why did it take a resignation to make the firm react?”

“How do you think these changes will affect your relationship with the Partner you ‘complained’ about?”

“Why is there suddenly twelve grand available as additional salary now, when apparently it wasn’t before you resigned?”

“Can you see yourself becoming a partner in the firm in a few years time?”

“Do you really think all the changes the firm is proposing will really happen?”

“And if they do implement them all, how long will it be before other issues arise that could unsettle you again?”

Usually, when I come across a counter-offer, it becomes a real test of the candidate’s ‘mettle’.

If Simon is totally committed to leaving, it does not matter what his present employer comes back to him with, his mind is made up and that’s that. It could be a case of being too little, too late.

If Simon was reluctantly leaving in order to move up, and these changes are the answer to his prayers, then the recruiter may well have to go back to square one. Whatever Simon says, it’s his decision, and one that cannot be taken lightly.

In my own experience, when a good candidate has made up their mind to move, there is little any employer can do the tempt them to stay. Throwing money at a problem (a resignation) in order to solve it will only keep a less than ideal person in a less than ideal job – basically proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that they’re simply in it for the money.

And while, sure, money is important, it’s far from everything. Sometimes it’s simply a change of scenery, a new firm, a new location or a new challenge that is more important that the cash, but, of course, only you can decide.

How Far Will You Go To Get What You Don’t Want?

“Why can’t they be like we were, perfect in every way, what’s the matter with kids today?” If you’re old enough to remember the song, you’ll know what I mean.

What is it with job seekers today, and why can’t they be like we were? How come they have such a difficult time making commitments?

In a North American world that runs on fear, fear of terrorism, fear one of our children will be snatched in the street, fear of the next pandemic, fear of making a mistake, there is a new fear creeping into the accountancy workplace among the ‘Gen Xers” and that is the fear of commitment.

This is a direct quote from an associate of ours when we asked for a referral for tax candidates, “I will do my best to help you. However, what I am experiencing is that almost every time someone tries to leaves their current firm, if the individual is any good, he or she will be offered whatever it takes to get them to stay. I need 4 tax managers in Ottawa. Our Calgary office would employ around 12 if we could find them. Lately I've had an individual sign back a great an offer and then send me an email two days later to advise that she had changed her mind!”

Send an email? Fear. Whatever happened to picking up the telephone, letting the firm that you have accepted an offer from know voice to voice, or even, heaven forbid, face to face that you’ve had a change of heart (or salary)? Doing the right thing? I don’t think so.

In our recruiting work we come across them all too often. The ‘I just want to look around and see what’s out there candidate’, it’s kind of a ‘grass is always greener on the other side’ sort of thing.

We do our best to weed them out of the recruiting process for our clients, because we know when it comes right down to it they have another agenda. Usually we succeed but nobody’s perfect and unfortunately the occasional one slips through the net.

Accounting firms and their recruiters alike have all been burnt one too many times. Even after ascertaining the intention of the candidate with questions like: “If you were offered a job at this firm today, what would be your answer?” and getting the response “Absolutely, it’s a great firm, I would go there in a heartbeat’, somehow things change.

Fair enough, after all everyone has the prerogative to expand their horizon a little, to see what kind of game they could be playing in another field. But what I can’t understand is how far they are willing to go with the big job bluff. Attend interviews with recruiters, sure. Attend interviews with clients, no problem. Entertain job offers, why not? Accept those offers or even worse, give the appearance of accepting them while operating on a different agenda? Unfortunately, yes.

Case in point. I have changed the names to protect the not so innocent, but recently we had a candidate, let’s call her Diana, who went through a two month back and forth process.

Several interviews, negotiating an offer, having the new employer agree to several thousands of dollars worth of pro bono work for her favourite charity included in the terms of agreement, and relentlessly haggling a higher salary, then in the end backing out after having accepted the position and misled both us and our client that she was simply waiting to see the partner she had worked for to agree a leaving date.

In the meantime they have wasted their own time, our time and worst of all, the time and money of the prospective employer. They have also prevented another equally qualified candidate from moving forward who could have been up and running in the position.

And this all happened the day before the Christmas holidays and six weeks before the start of busy season.

Does Diana really think that the extra five or ten grand they wheedled out of their present employer is going to change what previously wasn’t working for them at the firm now?

Will it give them more career satisfaction and allow them to take on greater challenges, enjoy international travel and progress more quickly within an egalitarian organization?

Will we be willing to help Diana in six months time when all the broken promises rise to the surface that made her consider a move in the first place?

No, No and No!

And now there is another more potentially career damaging prospect to fear. Not only does word get around about employee behaviour and impact future opportunities, but does this person really think that their present employer is going to look at them in the same light after having their feet held to the flame for more money?

Statistically, (and by the way did you know that 84% of statistics are made up on the spot?) they won’t last five years in their present firm. Their employer will start thinking about a back up plan should they decide to start looking around again and before you can say ‘breach of contract’ the back up plan will turn into the game plan and that employee will no longer be the starting quarter back.

Can they then flirt with the prospective firm again? In the words of our client, ‘I wouldn’t want them here now, even if they worked for free’.

The irony is that for the ‘just looking around but can’t commit’ candidates in their minds it is all about what’s best for them. What they don’t realize, however, is they are operating in their own worst interests in the longer term.