Eleventh Anniversary of The Partners’ Network Blog

This is the 1,058^th blog I have posted in the last 11 years. My first blog was posted on February 7, 2012, and it seems like a long time ago and also seems like yesterday. Time flies when you enjoy what you are doing and also when you are engaged in new things.

Posting a weekly blog sort of forces me to think of new ideas to write about. At first, the ideas were easy because I addressed concerns clients had. Because of the variety and volume of postings, I can now handle many client questions by sending them a link to a previous posting. I find I am doing this more and more lately, reducing the new topics I could write about. However, business and investing being what it is, there is still plenty to write about. I also have been able to use many of my blogs as material for speeches and webinars or handouts to clients that describe services they need and should have but often neglect because they are not “urgent.” This includes business succession planning, updated estate plans, buy-sell agreements and even ways to relook at their investment allocation.

In addition to posting about topics clients have expressed interest in, I also post blogs that document some of my personal activities and interests. Some of my blog posts are timeless, and I occasionally repost them on LinkedIn. Some recent ones got higher readership than when originally posted. In particular, my blog about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (who spoke at my Baruch College graduation two months before he presented his “I have a dream” speech) and my Auld Lang Syne New Year’s Blog. One of my favorites is the “Even Apple is Human” 2012 blog which I frequently provide links to clients and students that ask me how stock prices are determined. I also post links to everything I write on LinkedIn, and readers can post comments or “likes,” making that a good way to be connected and for me to determine interest in a topic. Also, once out there, they are out there. One of my blogs on transfer pricing a few years ago generated some business in the past year.

This semester I am teaching a graduate seminar at Baruch College on How to Manage an Accounting Practice and am enjoying it immensely. I started out intending to write a “book” for each of the topics I would be discussing. The first session was on “How to Start an Accounting Practice” and had a manageable 70-page handout. The second session was on “Pricing, Billing and Collecting Fees,” and the book was 133 pages, which seemed a little too much for the students. More than they would ever need or want to know, although I believe my colleagues would certainly want to buy such a book. The “book” for the third session, which is Wednesday, ended up at 172 pages on “Staffing an Accounting Practice,” and after I looked at my “proud creation,” I thought how nutsy this was. While I have included considerable information of value to someone running a practice, I realized this was overkill for my students. The purpose of my class should be to convey the flavor of running a practice, its environment and benefits and challenges, not to make them expert in every facet of it. So, I put aside my magnum opus and put together a PowerPoint presentation to accompany my class discussion, with highlights, insights and special issues of hiring, training, developing and managing staff. This should make Wednesday’s class interesting and move at a decent pace. I also added a 24-page handout of anecdotes and tips to be a successful employee, which most will become before they ever start their own practice.

I then started working on the next two class sessions so that the information would be focused on, and relevant to, my students. The multiple-book idea, while ambitious and interesting [to me], has been set aside for who knows when. By the way, my lecture notes for two MBA classes I taught at Fairleigh Dickinson have been made into books after considerable editing, so my “crazy” ideas are not always so crazy.

I enjoy teaching and feel satisfied that I am able to give back. I also like the interaction with young, lively, energetic, excited and bright students. This keeps me always looking forward to tomorrow and creating new stories about what I did “yesterday.”

One of the things that keep me busy are calls from accountants and potential clients for specialized advisory services that Withum is great at. I enjoy finding out the “problems” and then connecting them to the many talented specialists at Withum who could now help them better than I ever could. Things have changed, and public accounting and especially Withum, has been transformed into behemoths providing professional services in every critical area a client would need assistance in. One of the major areas I am particularly proud of is our involvement in digital marketing, cyber security protection, and incident remediation. What we are doing here is mind-boggling.

Regardless of the fast-growing array of new services public accounting firms provide, one thing that hasn’t changed is the services we provide to help clients. With the overabundance of data available to clients, our roles have become even more important in helping clients review, analyze, interpret and make sense of their data. What clients also need is to understand the underlying meaning of the numbers and how yesterday’s and today’s numbers can be predictive, projected and trended toward the future. This is exciting work and provides good value to our clients, and can help propel growth. Many of my blogs have also addressed such problems, and I intend to keep doing it for at least another eleven years.

I just want to add one comment. The support I get on the blogs at Withum is beyond great, and I specifically want to thank the marketing staff that helps me with these blogs. While my name is on it, many hands touch it to make sure it delivers the right message and they are posted timely. Special cheers to Allison Katz and Kelly Materia, who are top-notch professionals, and it is my good fortune to know and work with them.