Designed For: Recently Promoted Managers
Course Length: Two Hours
What do your people need to make an effective transition to Manager?
After all, when they get promoted to manager, they’re no longer just a “doer,” are they? No, they’re moving into a whole new territory as a Manager, which means they’re going to start conducting the orchestra to a degree. That’s going to call for them to direct other people to ensure that they perform more efficiently and accurately. And that’s where they’ll begin to realize, in a significant way, that their success is largely dependent upon their subordinates.
The Developing Effective Managerial Skills course will help provide your recently promoted Managers or about-to-be-promoted Managers with two essential skill-sets:
When a Manager takes the time to give someone an assignment and explain it, what is it that they’re looking for? What are the deliverables? How much time should the staff member spend on the assignment? Why does the client want a certain outcome? What are we as a CPA firm trying to accomplish? What does the Manager need to do?
Providing the answers to these questions can equip your new Manager to inspire others to perform at a higher level and perhaps go the extra mile to provide great client service.
Designed For: Senior Managers
Course Length: One Hour
There are numerous paths to help your firm add revenue, but perhaps one of the smartest avenues to pursue is the one where your firm expands its services to an existing client that already knows, likes and trusts you.
So how do you do that? Start with PSG’s Client Service Planning Workshop, an easy step for your Senior Managers to learn how to uncover hidden client needs and harness the power of your firm. When the moment of new business opportunity happens, such as something mentioned in conversation during a meeting, your people must be focused on what each client needs – not just what that professional can provide. With these personal blinders removed, your Managers can think more broadly and identify critical resources within the firm quicker to better serve the client and earn additional revenue for the firm.
The client themselves may not even know they have a need or only be vaguely aware of the fact that they have an issue that needs attention.
During this session, we’ll teach your Managers how to recognize those situations in which the client has needs that fall beyond the Manager’s technical expertise. They’ll learn how to trust others in the firm to minimize risk to your clients and the firm.
As a result, your firm won’t miss out on those precious opportunities that need to be capitalized on. This way, your Managers can put on a new business hat by learning how to think about the client’s needs on a deeper level. And that stands to keep that additional revenue and profitability under the roof of your firm rather than moving to a competitor.
Designed For: Senior Managers Transitioning To Partner
Course Length: Three Hours
As a role model and teacher who made Partner when he was 31 years old at KPMG, PSG’s Jim Brasher knows that advancing to the partner role in a firm doesn’t happen by sitting behind a desk. It’s about managing a business because that’s what a Partner does.
Jim’s Becoming A Partner course will open the Senior Manager’s eyes to all that they are about to be responsible for as a Partner: Serving a book of clients, growing new client relationships and taking care of the people who work for them today are the crucial elements that partners have to effectively manage. How will they balance these three elemental responsibilities? How will they manage the constant change of clients in their book of business? Are they prepared for staff turnover? And by the way, how does one keep honing and evolving their technical knowledge once they’ve made Partner?
When students of this course acquire the understanding of what it takes to build trust with clients and their subordinates, they’ll be well-positioned to create loyal firm advocates and build a sustainable business going forward.
Designed For: Senior Staff
Course Length: One Hour
It’s incredible how some Seniors just “get it” when it comes to communicating with their superiors and subordinates. The attention to detail. The agenda-setting. The follow-up. Nothing falls through the cracks.
What if that kind of communication doesn’t come naturally to your Seniors on staff? Guess what: It doesn’t happen that way for most. The trick is to be so good at relationship building that it looks like you aren’t even trying.
Make no mistake: In our full hour together through the Effective Communications for Seniors course, your people will discover the steps for thorough, intentional, careful planning to create seamless communication, which in turn builds outstanding trust among members of the team. It’s how your best Seniors stand out from the crowd. It’s how teams are brought closer together. And it’s how your client relationships continue to grow and flourish.
Courses like this are the building blocks of making a good culture even better. Let’s get your firm feeling that way today.
Designed For: Senior Staff
Course Length: Three Hours
When you work long hours, do a lot of the same things and come into the office on Saturdays during busy season, it’s a big challenge to maintain focus and hope that the “real important work” will kick in soon.
Is there any wonder why most Seniors leave firms after two years and before they become Managers?
Let’s turn that around with a course that promotes a new way of thinking ahead for your Senior staff: One that helps them think about their career with a fresh set of eyes and what’s in it for them.
PSG’s Career Thoughts For Seniors course will show them the possibility for career acceleration in a public accounting firm like yours, showcasing the opportunities that lie ahead at the Manager and Senior Manager levels. We’ll discuss the broader variety of new skills and challenges in store as we show seniors the wider perspective of how public accounting firms are structured, including the drive to create as many partners as possible.
We’ll also contrast the CPA firm’s structure and promotion path to other types of businesses, where moving up in the private sector can be profoundly more difficult and longer – because someone may need to quit, transfer or possibly pass-on before the subordinate can move up.
However, if that same individual stays with your firm until they make Senior Manager, they will leave with a six-figure income, attain a managerial level position in private industry, and ultimately will accumulate a much higher total in lifetime earnings than people who leave at only the Senior level.
The fact is, very few industries offer the opportunity to invest in yourself and learn on the job while you’re building some deep experience in your area of specialty.
We’ll hammer this point home as we excite your people on why they might want to stay at your firm for the long-haul: The career accelerator they’ve been looking for has been right in front of them all along.
Designed For: Managers
Course Length: Two Hours
When you have a recently transitioned Manager, they’re likely to have a range of questions on how to interact with their new team, such as:
Through our course on Delegating, Motivating and Managing Subordinates, we’ll teach your new Managers how to answer these questions and position them to make a successful transition to manager. They’ll also discover how to help you identify top talent within your walls. And that’s awfully powerful too.
During our time together, we’ll touch upon the power of being vulnerable – that’s right, you read that correctly. When new Managers open themselves up to admit what they don’t know, they create new doorways for members of their team to step up and show their strengths.
Finally, in an era where diversity and inclusion couldn’t be more important, this course will shed light on what Managers can do to help create an environment where different perspectives are listened to and embraced to arrive at better ideas and results.
Designed For: Senior Staff
Course Length: Three Hours
It sounds funny to say that you’d treat anybody differently. But take a closer look: Every client has different expectations when it comes to the service they expect from your firm. Every person on the client service team needs to understand that client service is job number 1. Knowing what they expect and then delivering great service is the key to long-lasting and profitable client relationships. Effective communication skills are absolutely essential.
This calls for a very high level of adaptability among your Senior staff. Do they have that instinct? Probably not. But PSG’s Super Client Service course can give it to them.
We’ll show your Senior staff how to take control of relationships from a communication standpoint to set, meet and exceed expectations of others while preserving work-life boundaries.
Since even the smallest of issues add up, we’ll talk about being on the same page with the client, being transparent about costs and providing firm details after the meeting to build trust and rapport.
This is how more Seniors can set themselves – and your firm – up for success.
Designed For: Senior Managers
Course Length: Two Hours
So often, we put the weight of new business on a select few superstars at the firm, such as a handful of Partners. But what happens when those Partners retire? What then?
Through the Targeting New Business course, we see a better way. One that enlists and elevates more Senior Managers to be more aware of client needs via the data they come across and the active listening they engage in. We’ll train them on what to look for in client scenarios. What are the situations they’re struggling with? What questions should they be asking the client? What information do they consume? How does the client make decisions?
By creating this composite client profile and then realizing they have an active role in shaping the firm’s client opportunities, you will help more Senior Managers rise through the organization as they open the door to more leads and converted engagements. It also helps them understand that revenue generation is simply a matter of satisfying existing client needs in most situations.
Designed For: Senior Staff
Course Length: One Hour
Ironically, some of the most detail-oriented people in CPA firms have trouble with time management. There’s the client work, but also time reports, performance reviews and goal setting and other matters that take time. Where to turn? How to budget for it all? Is having a life even an option? Thankfully, time management is very controllable when you understand how to manage your priorities and communicate what work you have to do and when its due.
In our Time Management course, your senior team members will work with us for an hour to understand how to create more time for themselves through clear communication and transparency to others in the firm as well as outside of it. We’ll even show them how to change “No” to “Not Now, But Later” to keep the peace in the group and ensure to the other party that their request is being taken seriously while top priorities elsewhere can be met.
Designed For: Senior Staff
Course Length: Two Hours
All too often, people within a CPA firm who are eager to talk about everything they can do, their team can do and the firm can do miss a rather large piece of insight from the client. How does that happen? Simple. They haven’t been trained in listening to the prospect or existing client for their real areas of need. And if they can actively listen, they might recognize the moment of opportunity to probe a bit further for details.
During this two-hour course – Thoughts on Listening and Selling – PSG will teach your senior staff how to use active listening and asking good questions at the right time to be highly consultative rather than overly showy and sell-ish, risking turning off the client/prospect in the process. Instead, we’ll engage in exercises that layer one question on top of another that draws out more in-depth details but also teach your team how to have just the right balance so that they aren’t pouncing on the first “pain point” they hear about.
Through better listening, they’ll see that through patience, genuine curiosity and a consultative approach, more clients will open up to your senior staff. And when that happens, dollars and engagement are sure to follow.
This is the age-old question for most firms. The truth is the margin of differentiation is pretty slim. Most successful firms recognize that their secret weapon is their people. But, it’s not enough to have bright, capable talent on board; these individuals must possess a passion for excellence and a commitment to serve. How does a firm instill or encourage these qualities? Take away the rhetoric, buzzwords, and jargon, the key to sustainable success comes down to a firm’s ability to do two things very well.
Professional Strategy Group (PSG) is led by Jim Brasher. PSG is dedicated to helping professional services firms create advocates and competitive advantage.
