Clients are Buying Our Continuous Firm Learning

Blumer CPAs · 3 years ago · 79 views

One thing we believe that sets us apart as a firm is our commitment to learning with our team. You can always know this about our firm: we are talking about new things, learning new things, being challenged by what we already (think we) know, and making presentations of new concepts to each other. It means we are in a constant state of maturing as a team.

Of course, we have to do this on the technical side of our profession (it’s required!). And we let the team lead this learning too, from their own perspective. Our leadership team is always seeking to know what our learning is for the upcoming weekly team meeting. Since our whole team leads these weekly meetings, we’ve just had the idea to allow each team member to bring their own article, video, or personal learning to the table so we can all continue to expand our minds.

Firm Owners Should Be Teaching

It’s great to hear from your team and their brilliance in teaching. But as the owner of a firm, you have immense knowledge in the profession and you also have opinions about how your professional financial services should be delivered. So firm owners should be doing some of the teaching as well. The team needs to hear from the owner on the vision, purpose, and proprietary ideas of what the firm sells. It reminds us all that we are different. A client cannot go get the same service or knowledge from any other firm on the planet because what we do is proprietary.

We made it up and we believe there are particular ways to deliver our services.

Once a month, we gather our Technical Team together (all of the CPAs and Accountants) and we discuss scope issues, client service issues, and we have a time of learning too. I took this last teaching slot and prepared a 50 minute-long training session called the “Blumer Financial Services Bootcamp.” We took a picture!

We taught through some of our clients’ financial advisory presentations and discussed new ideas on how we can deliver our knowledge to those we have the privilege to serve. These are smart people so they get it (and also ask hard questions), and they are also eager to learn and grow together. If they don’t agree with something I say, they’ll say something. Which is what makes our firm better.

So what are our clients buying? They are buying an ever-improving firm, one that is always learning and growing and evolving and teaching. And we don’t even charge for it. But it is important to know that this is what our clients are purchasing from us.