Editor's Note: In "The Bold Advisor," Caldwell Consulting & Training's Carla Caldwell and Karbon's Ian Vacin provide an up close and personal look at several leadership tools designed to help you face your Yeti during this year "Scaling New Heights®" conference on Monday, June 5.
It's all about the tools and strategies for leading your team. "You are hiking the trail and you see the yeti in the distance," says Carla Caldwell, owner of Caldwell Consulting & Training. "You need to get past him. How can you navigate a change of course? Some may choose a GPS to find their way around. Others may prefer a paper map. Still others choose to check the sun’s position."
Part of the excitement of her job as consultant and coach for accounting firms (and not-for-profits) is to watch a firm thrive because the leader has implemented fresh strategies and tools to meet the challenges they face in their business.
"Not every tool works for every leader, but a conference like the "Scaling New Heights®" conference is the perfect opportunity to evaluate a variety of strategies and decide which ones will work for you," she says. "It helps to determine a course of action for when you return to the office. It is also where you can gain confidence in implementing those strategies as you learn from others."
With a recipe and vision for the future, you'll break that down further from yearly objectives and goals to quarterly strategies, measures and tactics.
In "The Bold Advisor" sessions," Ian Vacin of Karbon and Carla will discuss several leadership tools to help you face your Yeti. At "The Bold Advisor" sessions, you'll not only evaluate the tools, but you'll be given time to actually put down on paper how you can use the strategies for your specific team.
With this approach, you will return home from the conference with a plan in place to lead your team to the next level.
These sessions are designed to be workshops allowing you to really dive deep into the strategies, to be very practical and immediately useful for you and your firm.
Of course, the sessions aren’t the only time you will have to hear about successful business strategies. Take the time during breaks and meals to speak with other leaders and discuss some strategies that worked for them.
For Carla, talking together outside the sessions with others in our field is one of the highlights of the conference. "I look forward to meeting you and equipping you with the leadership tools you can use to become a more effective leader for your team. See you soon.”
Now, Ian will dive into the details of what will be presented in "The Bold Advisor" series with an article he titled, "Be the Leader, Be the Bold Advisor."
“As I have toured the U.S. over the past few years speaking and training thousands upon thousands of accounting professionals, I consistently hear about the desire to grow their accounting firms and a lack of time and knowledge of the best way to do it," Ian says. "Collectively, accountants are too focused on the client project work that requires immediate attention than to plan for the coming quarter, let alone set aside time to plan for the coming year (or years).
"The Bold Advisor" series your opportunity to take that vital step back. Join Carla and Ian to explore how to build the foundation of a successful accounting practice – from devising a winning, durable firm strategy to putting in place proven management techniques to be the Bold Advisor.
With two workshops and one lecture, you'll not only learn what you should do, you'll actually spend time doing it.
In the “Bold Advisor Pre-Conference Workshop,” you'll find out how to determine your firm’s purpose, mission, values and key objective, and then work in groups to formulate these. The workshop will start with techniques to understand more about yourself and your staff – since so much of your internal efficiency and client-facing interactions are driven by you and your team’s personality and team collaboration dynamics.
Next, we'll explore your firm's strengths and weaknesses and why that matters. These steps will help provide the foundation to build the pillars of your firm — your purpose, mission, values and key long-term objectives. From starting with the people and their characteristics, you will be able to create a compelling, honest, and durable strategy that can help drive your firm’s long-term success.
"Not every tool works for every leader, but a conference like the "Scaling New Heights®" conference is the perfect opportunity to evaluate a variety of strategies and decide which ones will work for you." – Carla Caldwell, Caldwell Consulting & Training
To be a part of the journey, join us for this interactive workshop on Sunday, June 4, 10 a.m.
In the second installment of "The Bold Advisor," a synopsis of both workshops will be brought together end-to-end from leadership to strategy to management. Leveraging advice and lessons from the most progressive and successful firms across the globe, you'll walk through how the firm foundations from the earlier workshop translate into short, medium and long-term strategies through horizon planning.
With a recipe and vision for the future, you'll break that down further from yearly objectives and goals to quarterly strategies, measures and tactics. Critical management techniques in regards to project ownership, firm operating mechanisms and project management will be explored.
All this requires change, so finally, we'll discuss the seven steps to change management to ensure the changes you decide to put in place are embraced by yourself and your entire team.
Join Carla and Ian for this session on Monday, June 5, at 8 a.m.
In the final workshop for "The Bold Advisor" series, they'll take a deep-dive into the strategy and management of successful firms. You'll learn detailed best practices to build a primary long-term firm objective and then break it down from long to short-term using business planning techniques like horizon planning.
From the key strategies that you’ll identify in the workshop, you'll discover the techniques of Chris McChesney’s and Sean Covey’s “The 4 Disciplines of Execution" to ensure they go from concept to execution as expected.
Lastly, you'll explore the best practice operating mechanisms that successful firms use not only to ensure the success of the key priorities, but for all activity across the firm. Join them for the last workshop for the Bold Advisor series on Monday, June 5, at 1:30 p.m.
To be the Bold Advisor for your clients, you need to have a strong foundation for your firm and a recipe for success. Through the Bold Advisor series, you’ll get the details of how to do that and start to build the components that you’ll need.
You can find more details about each of the sessions in a downloadable document located here: Download Course Descriptions.
Reminder: As your ever-faithful Sherpas, we stand ready to guide and encourage you along your chosen path. If you would like to consult with us about your path, please email me at coliver@woodard.com or Liz at ecolley@woodard.com.
Be sure to tell us your goals and what you hope to learn so we can recommend appropriate paths for your upcoming learning experience at the 2017 Scaling New Heights® conference.
Carla Caldwell
Carla Caldwell is the owner of Caldwell Consulting & Training and is quite passionate about small businesses, accountants and education. She has over 15 years teaching small- and mid-market accounting packages as well as report and financial statement design. She holds a degree in Accounting from Florida State University, and previously worked for two different software companies focused on small businesses, Sage and Xero.Carla works with business owners (especially non-profits) to bridge the gap between growing business and specific accounting solutions. She also helps accounting and bookkeeping firms implement the tools that help them to be more successful – from value pricing to process development to the apps that support their systems.
Ian Vacin
Ian Vacin, VP of Product Marketing at Karbon (karbonhq.com), has more than 20 years of experience in the tech and accounting industries. Prior to Karbon, Ian was a key leader of Xero in the United States (Vice President of Marketing & Product) and spent almost 10 years at Intuit, where he led the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program. He has led marketing, product management, and engineering teams in Fortune 500 companies and early stage startups.