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 will help you formulate manageable strategies to develop your sustainable and growing firm.
Description
When you’re caught up in the day to day running of your practice it can be hard to see the big picture… and even harder to find the time to formulate and implement the strategies required to keep your practice profitable and sustainable.
This course starts by assessing where your practice is now - what do you know and, possibly more importantly, what you do not know. It then follows through with five modules addressing key themes which are likely to resonate with sole practitioners and partners like you:
- Building sustainability,
- Service offering and adding value,
- Creating a sustainable team,
- Leveraging technology, and
- Risk management.
Maybe you feel your firm’s brand isn’t strong enough, or some of your clients are higher value than others, or you should be moving towards cloud computing but don’t know what to do or where to start. Each topic has a reference section, along with an extended case study – Elite Accounting – to help you see a way forward. There are also activities which move the focus to your own firm – does your firm have the right mix of knowledge and skills and do you have a social media policy in place to manage risk? At the end of each topic, you overlay your original assessment of your practice with what you now know, and are guided to map out manageable short and long term strategies – your ‘Roadmap’ for the future.
This course consists of one hard copy learning manual and one online assessment.
Want to know more? Click below to view a sample of the learning manual:
Learning objectives
- Building sustainability
- Identify the characteristics of a ‘sustainable firm’
- Evaluate the sustainability and growth position of your firm
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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.