The Highly Profitable Accountant

The Highly Profitable Accountant – Take Control of Your Practice, Make More Money and Get Your Life Back by Rudi Jensen

This book is aimed at people who own their own accountancy practice. It looks into how you can transform your practice so that it is both more profitable and you get freedom from it. It is split up into two parts. Part one about being a better you and working on your mindset. It encourages you to really explore what it is you want out of life and your practice, before working on how to go about it in part two.

Part 2

In part two, Rudi introduces a concept using a triangle and labelling the three corners. On the three corners are Growth, Team and Systems. In order to get to the next step of achieving freedom in your business, you need to have all three corners of your triangle complete and fully working. The things that you need to consider are getting an A + team, systemised processes including onboarding, getting in control of your debtors and various key KPI’s. The Growth part is looking at sales and marketing including getting the pricing right.

I’m no longer a practice owner so I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to relate to the book but as I was reading it I did find things that were useful. For instance when he writes about getting an A+ team, I wanted to know what it takes to be an A+ team member. It’s your attitude and ability. Ability can be trained but attitude is harder to change. He then tells you to write out your ideal candidates so that you can recruit them. He also looks at outsourcing, managing your team and firing staff.

The person who says it owns it. 

This is a great quote and suggests using this as a way to manage staff. Instead of telling the staff to do something by a certain time, ask them when they think they will be able to do it and that way the onus is on them to do it by then.

Systems are the next area he tackles in the book starting with the client experience from onboarding and keeping in touch with them. He explains how creating packages to suit their level of accounting requirements can help decide how much attention and work you need to do for the different clients. He then looks at debtors and getting someone in to get clients to pay up and to implement a direct debit system to help with cash flow. Finally, he looks at the KPI’s of the team and using them as a way to boost team productivity or just to see where the business is doing well or not.

The last corner of the triangle is about growth. This includes referrals, marketing, pricing and selling your services. It also mentions how you can sell other services that you may have been giving away for free without realising it.  This section I did skim through a bit since I don’t have a practice, and It’s not something I’m that interested in. There are interesting case stories about how people increased their referrals and therefore their turnover. In most cases, this was the last part of the triangle once the systems and teams are in place.

Additional Resources

There are lots of additional resources and downloads available to help you put all of this into action on his website. The final part of the book says how it’s all well reading this book, but nothing will come of it until you start to put all of this into action. It is an interesting book and there are lots of new and interesting things to read about even if you are not a practice owner. I especially found part one and chapters 6 and 7 regarding teams very interesting.

And as the end of the book blurb says, ‘If you are serious about taking control of your practice and getting off the treadmill, as others have already done, then this book will show you exactly how to do that.’