You’ve already built a solid business that you have great pride in. Yet, if you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’re on a constant search for how to make your business better. One way to focus your search is to look for the weakest link in your business. From a return-on-investment standpoint, working on and fixing your weakest link is the highest payback thing you can do. It lifts your entire company up and makes it stronger. The key is to look as objectively as possible at what might be holding your business back from being even greater than it already is. Here are four major areas where you can look for your weakest link: 1. Client-facing interactions A great area to start looking is where you have interactions with clients. These include things like phone greetings, email, websites, your storefront, your presence at networking meetings, client service interactions, your proposals, invoices, and thank you notes. What jumps out at you as the weakest link when you look through the above list? Perhaps it’s as simple as recording a more friendly voice mail greeting or as complex as getting your website redone. Don’t get overwhelmed if a lot of these items need [...]
General CPA Musings: How About a Little American Flag History?
Happy Fourth of July! Well, it is almost time for Independence Day again (not the Will Smith movie from 1996, although I love that flick) so let’s do a little American history. In fact, how about a little American flag history? This year marks the 237th anniversary of Congress passing the act establishing an official flag for the new nation. Take a look at this posting in PBS.org called “A Capitol Fourth” talking about the history of Old Glory and things related to this, like Flag Day: http://www.pbs.org/a-capitol-fourth/history/old-glory/ It is always cool to see how different traditions start and evolve to the present day. So be sure and enjoy the fourth of July and watch that flag wave in the breeze (don’t drink too much and fall into the BBQ pit.) For financial, accounting and tax musings, You can count on us to count for you! Email: bstonercpa@sbcglobal.net Phone: 818-317-6035 Website: www.briantstonercpa.com Android and the IPhone: Has been Featured On https://twitter.com/bstonercpa
General Musings of a Burbank CPA: Am I Happy?
With all our job and time responsibilities today and as a small practitioner looking for those bigger and better clients, this simple question can be a hard one to answer. Look at this article in AccountingToday by Edward Mendlowitz for his insight in how to possibly answer this question: http://www.accountingtoday.com/news/managing_practice/art-of-accounting-am-i-happy-71034-1.html This can be as simple as ignoring things and people that make you unhappy or structuring your life to keep things in your ‘happy’ zone, but it is more than that – it should be an outlook on things that is independent of outside influence. Years ago I found this writing by Charles Swindoll called ‘Attitude’ that helped me rethink how I responded to people: “The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company…a church….a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We [...]