Professionals who practice in the areas of accounting, assurance, or tax are often on the outside of discussions about strategy.
For many of us, we want to make a strategic contribution,
but we aren’t quite sure how.
Some of you may hold the view that it’s not our role to develop strategy, others of you may disagree.
If you are already making a valuable strategic contribution to your client, be it an internal or external client, I commend you.
If you are yet to achieve that, then please listen a bit longer.
Back when I was working in public practice, I can recall being a senior manager at the time and sitting down with a bunch of the partners
and other senior managers trying to brainstorm new and value added services that we could offer to our owner-manager clients.
Strategic planning was one such service that got suggested and I got tasked with sketching out the opportunity.
Coming up with the high level vision of the service offering was really easy. This was going to be so great.
Our clients were going to love us. The work itself would be interesting for our senior people.
We pretty much had access to all the people and the information. And we already had a trusted advisor relationship with our client.
It just made so much sense for us to extend our client relationship to now include an element of strategic planning.
So surely, strategic planning was a natural fit.
However, the idea never got off the ground because many of us - staff, mangers and partners alike –
had no background in strategic management.
When it comes to offering our clients advice about accounting and tax matters – that’s definitely in our wheelhouse.
We are the smartest people in the room on those sorts of matters. But strategy?
What can we possible add to the conversation that the owner-manager doesn’t already know or has already hired others to figure out?
This course has been developed with that unfinished mission in mind.
Whether you choose to develop strategic planning as a service line or not, is entirely up to you.
My goal in this course is to give you enough insight and understanding of strategic management to engage in the conversation with
your internal or external client with confidence.
This course breaks down strategic management into four phases: Assessing the future state; Assessing the current state;
Strategy development; and Performance management.
In each lesson, you’ll learn how to gather information, analyze the data, and provide value- added advice to your client
in plain, simple language that any client can understand.
Strategic management is often thought to be something reserved only for large organizations.
Nothing can be further from the truth. In fact, if your client is still in business today, they’ve got a strategy.
But the questions for you to consider are:
1. Is it the right strategy? 2. Is it well executed? 3. Will it be successful for years to
come?
Included with this course is a turnkey strategic management toolkit for you to use with your clients.
It literally boils down strategic management to 20 key questions pertaining to each of the four phases of strategic management.
I’ve also provided you with a one-page working paper for you to maintain in your client’s permanent file.
Surely, this is a turnkey, incremental service opportunity improvement that you should consider incorporating into
your existing client relationship.
My name is Blair Cook and if this sounds promising to you, click on the first lesson to begin.