Important audio message from Rick on the Economic Crisis

Good morning everyone,

Rather than write to you about what you can be doing to help your clients now, and how we can  help, I’d rather speak to you.

Please click on the link below for a 3 minute message that is essential to your role as an advisor.
http://www.ranone.com/files/Tuesday_Morning.mp3 (if you are unable to click on the link below, simply copy and paste the link into your browser)

After you’ve listened to my message, here are three links that are referenced:

1) For the Economic Crisis Survey and Report
2) To read Michael Darren’s e-mail
3) For the Annual Conference

We encourage your feedback and comments.  Please click here to leave your feedback and comments.

Thank you,

Rick

Comments

[Tom Erichsen]

Rick

Thought I would pass along a couple of observations regarding our economic times.

As accountants/business advisors, I believe we have a duty & opportunity to communicate with our clients & COI’s. We are unique as accountants and RANONE accountants that we see lots of businesses and business processes, in reality, we probably know as much or more about the business as do the owners – we need to market this knowledge better to the business community.

This should be a great time to visit with clients about their business (in their business location) using our RANONE tools & marketing process.
Each business has some unique issues that need to be exposed to us so we can help the work thru their issues. The initial consultation discussion could discover some pain points. Additionally, we need to involve their lender in the process to get agreement on the issues and the resulting decisions and their impact as the business implements changes in their operations. (for the RANONE member this is a double play in marketing – getting in front of both at the same time).

Additionally, as RANONE member firms, we need to get the whole firm together to discuss our message, discover opportunities, then send our team members out to visit our clients. This may mean that our specialists in other areas of the firm will need to wear different hats (working ON the RANONE business). For example, by definition, taxation is usually done after the books are closed for the year and taxes applied – why not send our tax team members out into the clients business with a set of questions discovering issues about their business before the year end (when decisions can have a real business impact – not just tax planning impact). With the goal of helping the business stay healthy & poised for the future. With the results of the client discussions, the interviewer can bring back the information to the business development group for discussion and possible consulting engagements (win for the client / win for the firm)

I have had some success recently in visiting with our clients and the local banks (their management group & loan officers) telling our story as RANONE member and our new direction as business advisors. We are getting results from those meetings with more engagements to follow. Attached is our presentation to bank groups. ( We take our story right to the decision makers)

We welcome other ideas to assist our business clients

I hope some of these ideas help not only our clients, but also others in the RANONE network.

Tom Erichsen

[Mike Celada]

This is a very important message from Rick Solomon. I feel we all need to take a few minutes of our time to really listen and reflect upon our roles on improving the circumstances of not only our clients, but our own businesses in this challenging economic environment.

If you are unable to access the audio from clicking on the link simply copy and paste the following url into your internet browser http://www.ranone.com/files/Tuesday_Morning.mp3