Key areas for business self-reflection
For starters, does the current state of your tax prep business look like what you envisioned it to be when you first launched it starry eyed and full of hopeful optimism? If not, why not? In short, honest self-reflection is the first stage of getting your business running optimally and should include questions such as:
- Are corporate and individual partners fully committed to your business success?
- Is antiquated tax technology holding you back in any aspect (quality of life, productivity)?
- Was your tax season work rewarded with a generous enough ROI?
- What part of your current marketing plan brought the most customers?
Real-time cause and effect evaluations
After self-reflection, one must assign root causes for the challenges encountered. Often, this is where difficult decisions must be made.
For instance:
- The blame for missing an important family event (the effect), could be due to the fact your tax technology does not allow anytime, anywhere access (the cause).
- Alternatively, a higher attrition rate in returning customers (the effect), may be the result of a limited tax prep services menu (the cause).
The list of examples may be much longer in some tax offices, but it is important that cause and effect correlations are drawn by the tax shop owner.
Actionable steps to ‘right the ship’
Once the self-reflection and evaluation stages have been covered, it is now time to take actionable steps toward addressing the identified shortfalls.
Actionable steps mean just that, ACTION. But what actionable steps to take may be difficult to decide, such as:
- What expanded services make sense for your office to add in the future?
- Does providing support to customers in the new Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) space make sense?
- When and to what extent should you consider migrating your tax prep business to the cloud, if at all?
- Should you consider a more digital or old-school approach to marketing your business?
Assessment and answers to these challenges must be discussed if tax pros hope to break out of the morass of the status quo and bring new life to their tax business.
