What’s your measure of success?

Most accountancy firms have a set of metrics that includes turnover, gross recurring fee income, profits and average fee per client. And of course, all of those figures are important.

But do they really motivate you?

Do they mean something to you at an emotional level?

If the answer is ‘no’, then you’ll struggle to really get excited about improving the numbers. And there’s even less incentive if those numbers are looking reasonably OK.

In previous articles I’ve talked about being really clear about what you want to achieve in your accountancy practice and where you want it to go. As part of that you’ve hopefully identified what it is that really drives you.

This is different for everyone, of course. For one accountant I worked with it was wanting to make a real difference to both his team and his clients. He wanted to help his team develop their careers so they could live a happy, fulfilled life and he wanted his business owner clients to improve their businesses so they could do the same. His measure of success was the number of prospects who approached him on the strength of his reputation and the number of people who wanted to join his team.

What are you passionate about? What is it that really fires you up? How does it bring you closer to your goals for your practice?

What I’m asking is, what does success really mean for you?

Measure what matters to you

What you measure will depend on your answer to that question. It could be something like:

• an annual total of all the tax you’ve saved your clients
• collecting case studies from clients that demonstrate what a difference you’ve made to them (that’s actually one of mine at AVN)
• the impact your charitable giving is making in your local community or in the wider world – you could measure funds raised or how much time you and your team have given
• how many hours you’ve helped your clients save from working in their business, so they can spend more time with their families and doing the things they love
• the new skills and qualifications your team members have acquired.

Work out how you will measure the metric you’ve decided on and how it feeds into those top line metrics I mentioned earlier – turnover, profits etc. After all, these are the end result of what you do. Ultimately, profits are the consequence of doing the right things for the right people.

Once you start to measure the things that really matter to you, you’ll have a powerful drive to improve those numbers. And that makes it easier than ever to move your practice to where you want it to be.

Download your free copy of my best-selling book for accountants, Putting Excellence Into Practice.

Shane Lukas – AVN for Accountants