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Colleagues building strategy
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This is the time to formulate a practice strategy

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29th Aug 2018
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For most accountants, August presents the perfect opportunity to take a holiday. Clients are away, the staff are away and the office would be baking hot.

If that break was successful, the main brainteasers would have centred around whether to swim before or after breakfast, how to escape the kids for a few hours and what to have for dinner.

The August bank holiday is always a watershed, splitting the period when most clients are away, offering downtime to their diligent advisers from a frantic autumn when we will all find ourselves desperately trying to play catch up.

There is, however, typically a very brief interregnum at least until the end of this week, while everybody tries to get back into gear.

Rather than spending three or four days discussing every colleague's holiday experiences and that annually repeated occasion when you forgot to put on sun cream after swimming and were mistaken for an oversized lobster by your five-year-old, this could be the time to formulate a practice strategy for the next year or even longer.

You might even think about bringing a whole department, office or even practice together for a session to brainstorm ideas about improvement and expansion (or even contraction).

With an economy that could be teetering on the brink or about to explode into the stratosphere, the European elephant making its way further and further into the room and the normal ups and downs of professional life, it is even more important to carry out this exercise in 2018 than in almost any other year.

Every practice will be different and you should already have a good idea of the pressures and opportunities that are in the offing but the following list might give readers a few ideas to ponder over the next few days:

  1. Service lines: Is this the moment to bring in new business strands or cut old ones?
  2. Mergers and acquisitions: time to think about buying or selling?
  3. Succession and retirement: If by any chance you are getting on in years then is this the perfect moment to pass the business on, sell up or at least begin the process?
  4. Staffing: Increase, decrease or change the mix? Perhaps this is the year to invite one or more thrusting superstars to become partners.
  5. Property: Is it worth investing in more office space or selling some off?
  6. Pensions: This is more of a personal point but pensions legislation always seems to be changing and there is no harm in having a chat with your IFA.
  7. Technology: This column will almost certainly be considering artificial intelligence overcoming weeks, months and years. Have you? More prosaically, is it time to get some souped-up kit which will pay for itself within a few weeks.
  8. Marketing: A fresh eye following a holiday can lead to really positive results.

There will be much more that you should be thinking about and if you don't take the time this week, the next opportunity will probably not come until Christmas. By then, your practice may just have missed a trick or two.

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