Building Resilience for your CPA Firm – 5 Strategic Steps from QXAS

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but a journey towards building more resilience for your firm, has 5 steps.

The New Normal has played truant with the best laid plans of CPA firms. CPAs are beset with both personal and professional problems courtesy COVID-19. These are challenging times but it is essentially during these times that the tough get going and surge ahead of their competition.

So, the question to ask here is – How does one toughen up a CPA firm? How do CPA firms ensure they have the solutions in hand to address any and every challenge coming their way and emerge victorious?

The QXAS webinar on Making Your CPA Firm More Resilient in the New Normal – 5 Strategic Steps Towards Success, presented by Harsh Shukla, Associate Vice President – US Operations at QXAS USA and hosted by  Liz Briggson from Encoursa has the answers. The key goal of the webinar is to help CPAs, EAs, tax and accounting professionals build resilience for their firms; this is the kind of resilience that stands them in good stead in the future.

Survival isn’t enough. One must take proactive steps to prosper even during challenging times. This thought is the highlight of the webinar.

The webinar begins with a discussion on how 2020 has dealt a bad hand to CPA firms and the numerous challenges they have to face including adapting to remote work, balancing the pressures of both home and office, finding their way around new tax legislations, trying to find time for strategic activities that can drive growth and more.

The difficulties faced by businesses is brought home by the fact that more than 97000 businesses had to down their shutters as a direct result of the pandemic.

Here are the 5 strategic steps towards building resilience as discussed in the webinar:

1. Strategize for the Worst – Have a Plan of Action for Multiple Scenarios

You cannot build resilience without having a strategy in place that drills down on your firm’s strengths and weaknesses and keeps an eye on the threats and opportunities. The challenges faced during the pandemic should be the benchmark and a wise firm will think about what more can go wrong, and plan from that point onwards.

2. Accelerated Digital Transformation

Your firm must be in readiness to adapt to rapidly changing scenarios and have the inherent agility to explore new growth avenues. This cannot happen without streamlining and enhancing process efficiencies with the help of technology integration.

3. External Resourcing – Add Resources, Keep Overheads in Check

You can only grow with the right resources, and in a world where hiring budgets are being trimmed, it makes sense to look beyond traditional hiring models. Don’t just search for the right resources domestically, but have a global outlook towards resourcing. Find a partner who has the accounting staff, expertise and infrastructure to act like an extension of your team. This will help you bolster your firm like nothing else can.

4. Customer-Centricity – Think Like your Customer

What is it that your customers want from your firm? What are their expectations from the quality and speed point of view? What are their pain points and do you have the expertise to solve these pain points with additional services? These are just some of the questions you must answer if you want to make your CPA firm more customer focused than before.

5. Explore New Growth Avenues – Push the Envelope

It’s imperative that you do what you are doing well, but try and find out what more you can do, to grow your business. Learn, unlearn, build skillsets and get out of your comfort zone. Be the first to get into a service that you think will deliver sustainable returns, and which (for the time being) doesn’t have a lot of competition. Explore.

This webinar also had a few polls baked into it, that asked attendees various questions regarding resilience, the problems they faced and what they thought was the single most important factor that drove resilience.

If you have already attended this webinar, we thank you for your attendance, but if you haven’t done so:

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QXAS provides accounting, tax returns, bookkeeping, and payroll services to a growing number of CPAs, EAs and accountants across the USA. QXAS is a SOC2 compliant company and adheres to the most demanding security protocols. 

Encoursa is an industry-leading provider of continuing education offering live webinars and a robust library of premium on-demand (self-study) training. Encoursa also partners with innovative providers of industry solutions to offer sponsored webinars. Learn more about them here.