The Inner Circle
A club for like-minded leaders and partners of 7+ figure accounting firms.
The Inner Circle
For leaders and partners of 7+ figure accounting firms.
The Inner Circle is a meeting of Partners and Managing Partners of 7+ figure firms who are looking for deeper dive conversations on all areas of running their firms than is found in the main international meetings.
Our February meeting findings included:
1. Once you ascend to a position of leadership/ownership, your role becomes one of ‘value creation’ for the firm and clients alike. Delegate as much as possible that doesn’t fall into that descriptor.
2. There are many attractive commercial opportunities for generating revenue outside of typical compliance work, now being realised and monetised by firms.
3. There are many attractive business models for accounting firms outside of the capacity management + efficiency + time-based billing model.
4. If the firm’s leadership is made up of compliance-based practising accountants, expect recruitment to be difficult.
5. Recruitment at a leadership level for people who possess the 'very skill set' NOT already possessed by the current incumbents.
6. There’s no such thing as a work-life and a home-life for firm owners. Everyone has the same number of days and hours. It’s just as OK to answer emails on a Saturday morning as it is to take a Wednesday afternoon off.
7. Firms with high fee growth comparative to their competitors are not scared of the three things that every other firm is:
a) Growth being dictated by current capacity.
b) Selling/releasing Grade D clients
c) Investing in Business Development methodology.
8. Allowing key members of your team to buy shares in the firm, can ensure the retention of top talent.
9. A team member cannot demonstrate commercial awareness if they are commercially uneducated.
10. Mentoring & shadowing are the two best ways of turning a senior manager into a commercial leader.
Apply to join us for our next Inner Circle on Thursday 22nd April 2021.
Meet Martin Bissett
Martin Bissett is the founder of the Upward Spiral Partnership (USP), the international consulting firm that specialises in enabling the accounting profession to win higher-end clients, create leaders from their ranks and save lives.
His professional purpose is to alert the accounting profession to the profound outcomes that their advisory expertise can create in the lives of their clients.
At the same time, he also alerts the accounting profession to the profound difficulties that can arise in the lives of their clients when they choose not to educate their clients about the impact that their advisory expertise can have.
The Upward Spiral Partnership is the 4th business Martin has played a key role in building and the first of his own.
In the first 5 years of USP, Martin has:
- Been engaged/retained by 4 of the World's Top 10 Accounting associations and 6 of the Top 10 in the UK.
- Authored 9 books including Passport to Partnership, content from which has been adopted into the curriculum of AAT Level 3 courses, and taught in selected UK colleges and US CPA Societies.
- Been retained by Accountingweb as a judge of their prestigious practice excellence awards for three years in a row.
- Been highlighted as ‘one to watch’ in AccountingToday’s Top 100 Most Influential countdown for 2 years running.
- Spoken on 4 continents.
- Created several trademarked items of intellectual property including the ACCOUNTS™ system and ‘Martin’s Relationship Pricing™’ Model.
- Written for several professional publications including AccountingToday, AccountingWeb, CPA Practice Advisor and Chartered One.
- Sat on many international expert panels and guested on professional podcasts in the US, UK, and Australia.
- Sits on a parliamentary steering committee tasked with bringing advisory services to the fore in the accounting profession.
The outcome of Martin’s work is profitable new business for the practices he is engaged by, alongside the fine-tuning of teams of partners and emerging leaders who can develop new business by increasing their commercial awareness for themselves, without significant ongoing third party assistance.
Previously, Martin served 10 years as a director (appointed at age 26) on the board of a marketing consultancy firm serving the accounting profession. There, he held the responsibility for the growth of the client base including six of the U.K.’s top 30 accountancy firms.
He now coaches, mentors, speaks, trains and consults with accounting firms worldwide.
In total, he has worked with over 1800 firms of accountants and found it unnecessary to keep track of his contributions to the new business growth of those firms once it surpassed £500m collectively.