In sports, plays drawn up in the coaching room are designed to work 100% of the time. There’s only one catch: plays executed on the playing field are faced with opponents, adverse weather, et al, which significantly bring the success rate of said plays down. Such an analogy squares well with your own tax practice, making self-reflection, evaluation and calibration of your work processes vitally important to making improvements after each filing deadline.

In the upcoming webinar Actionable Steps to Maximize Growth and Profit in Your Tax Preparation Business, Shannon Bond, VP, Preparer Segment at Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting, will speak to the five-year industry outlook, trends driving change in the tax prep space, as well as actionable steps preparers can take to stay competitive and profitable in an ever-changing industry. Here is a brief preview of some of the topics that will be up for discussion.

Key areas for business self-reflection

For starters, does the current state of your tax prep business look like what you envisioned it to be when you first launched it, when you were starry eyed and full of hopeful optimism? If not, why not? In short, honest self-reflection is the first stage of getting your business running optimally and should include questions such as:

• Are corporate and individual partners fully committed to your business success?
• Is antiquated tax technology holding you back in any aspect (quality of life, productivity)?
• Was your tax season work rewarded with a generous enough ROI?
• What part of your current marketing plan brought the most customers?

Real-time cause and effect evaluations

After self-reflection, one must assign root causes for the challenges encountered. Often, this is where difficult decisions must be made.

For instance:

• The blame for missing an important family event (the effect), could be due to the fact your tax technology does not allow anytime, anywhere access (the cause).
• Alternatively, a higher attrition rate in returning customers (the effect), may be the result of a limited tax prep services menu (the cause).

The list of examples may be much longer in some tax offices, but it is important that cause and effect correlations are drawn by the tax shop owner.

Actionable steps to ‘right the ship’

Once the self-reflection and evaluation stages have been covered, it is time to take actionable steps toward addressing the identified shortfalls.

Actionable steps mean just that, ACTION. But what actionable steps to take may be difficult to decide, such as:

• What expanded services make sense for your office to add in the future?
• Does providing support to customers in the new beneficial ownership information (BOI) space make sense?
• When and to what extent should you consider migrating your tax prep business to the cloud, if at all?
• Should you consider a more digital or old-school approach to marketing your business?

Assessment and answers to these challenges must be discussed if tax pros hope to break out of the morass of the status quo and bring new life to their tax business.

Ready to start your journey of improvement?

In conclusion, while each tax business will have its own unique challenges to wrestle with each year, there are some common trends occurring in the industry that will widely impact many tax pros in the near future. To ensure tax pros are abreast of these trends and can act accordingly, you’re encouraged to attend this free, CPE credited live webinar. Allow this informative webinar to be the catalyst to further fine-tune your tax practice for success. Register today!