Keeping your firm profitable and sustainable in an increasingly competitive and rapidly changing environment is challenging for ANY business owner. Whether you’re a sole practitioner or a partner in a larger firm, the principles and learnings from this course should help you formulate manageable strategies to develop your sustainable and growing firm.
Overview
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Keeping your firm profitable and sustainable in an increasingly competitive and rapidly changing environment is challenging for ANY business owner. Whether you’re a sole practitioner or a partner in a larger firm, the principles and learnings from this course should help you formulate manageable strategies to develop your sustainable and growing firm.
You will be guided through five modules:
- Building sustainability
- Service offering and adding value
- Creating a sustainable team
- Leveraging technology
- Risk management
As you work through this course, you’ll see a number of resources and activities that you can choose from, to help you get value from your learning. Throughout the course, you will refer to a case study ‘Elite Accounting’. This case study is designed to provide some practical insights into the challenges facing public practitioners.
At the conclusion of each module, you’ll be asked to complete your ‘Roadmap’ for the future’. This roadmap gives you the opportunity to identify SMART actions associated with your learnings from the module.
There are surveys for you to complete regarding the current state of your firm, and how you would like it to develop. These are solely for your own use, so be as honest as you can and take time to think about your answers. You’ll also find some space to record your thoughts. That way, you’ll end up with a true picture of your firm’s state compared with your current goals, set against the wider picture of today’s public practice.
By focusing, initially, on the current state of affairs in your firm, you’ll begin the process of identifying obvious gaps in your firm’s activities. You’ll also be in a better position to identify both quick wins and longer term goals.
You will be able draw everything together and transfer your learning to your own practice, not just via specific activities (such as completing a gap analysis for your firm in ‘Service offering and adding value’) but also by encouraging you to plan strategically both for the short and long term via your roadmap.
This course consists of a printable PDF learning manual and an online interactive video divided into 5 sections. Each section includes a pulse survey, a technology survey, your firm of the future survey, a reference guide, Excel templates, an extended case study with related activities, your firm activities and your roadmap. You will also need to complete an online assessment.
Click below to view a demonstration of this product.
Objectives
1. Building sustainability
- Identify the characteristics of a ‘sustainable firm’
- Evaluate the sustainability and growth position of your firm
2. Service offering and adding value
- Grade and classify your client base
- Complete a gap analysis to analyse existing services and identify growth opportunities in your firm
- Develop a strategy to increase service offering and value added activities to your clients
3. Creating a sustainable team
- Use the ‘Measure capacity needs’ tool to identify resourcing requirements in your firm
- Use a ‘Skills identification matrix’ to address individual and team development
- Describe how current HR practices influence productivity and sustainability
4. Leveraging technology
- Identify the potential risks and counter strategies associated with using social media in your firm
- Consider how new and emerging technologies and an e-business strategy could assist in addressing sustainability in your firm
- Identify actions to improve your firm’s efficiency through technological solutions
5. Risk management
- Identify key internal and external risks associated with the day to day operations and ongoing management of a sustainable firm
- Assess the likelihood and consequence of events that could lead to short-term or long-term damage to your firm
- Put in place strategies to address the internal and external risks to firm health and sustainability
Audience
This course is aimed at change agents and entrepreneurs with aspirations to evolve or upgrade their public practice for the future. It has been designed for practice owners/partners with 3+ years in practice.