Lessons from a storm

For those who were fortunate not to live in Northeast this weekend, the area got walloped by the worst storm since Hurricane Sandy. Rain, sleet, snow and wind gusts approaching 70 miles per hour knocked out power to roughly 1.5 million people from Maine to Pennsylvania and downed thousands of trees and power lines.

As of this writing there are still nearly 100,000 people in my area without electricity and appears that it will not be restored anytime soon. Many school districts are closed and to add insult to injury, another storm is expected to hit in mid-week.

As you can imagine, residents are at the end of their patience as the local power suppliers have been almost glacial in their response. In fact one of the towns had to call the local and state police to quell a near civil riot as some folks threatened the repair personnel due to their inability to make any progress.

In a word it’s ugly.

So yesterday I happened to be in line at the local grocery store and struck up a conversation with one of the repair lineman who explained that part of the problem was jurisdictional squabbles between state and local power authorities and who was responsible for what.  

So in addition to slow progress, residents have to bear the brunt of red tape as well. Strangely this got me to thinking about the changes about client services now impacting the CPA profession.

A generation ago, the accepted service matrix was a book of business. Your compensation was predicated in your book and your clients were your clients – period. Anyone encroaching on your client territory was treated like an armed intruder trying to break into your house.

But slowly at first and now moving at a decidedly quicker pace, more firms are changing over to the one-client one firm model. A client is the firm’s client, not Joe’s client or Ann’s client. They’re serviced by the firm. For example if one partner is more experienced in financial planning and a client needs wealth management help they will be directed to them, no matter who brought them on board.

That model is also far fairer to folks who don’t necessarily have a book of business but nonetheless are critical to a firm’s success such as the partner in charge of quality control.

In fact, our company is now engaged in two consulting projects to convert firms from the book of business to the one client model. And we expect a number of others to do the same.

So if that’s something you’ve been thinking about, give us a call. But if your power is out, sorry, there are just some things beyond our capability.