I've been with RBSK Partners PC since 1984, where I’ve been a managing partner for almost 10 years.

In this role, I’m responsible for managing our firm’s growth goals, employee experience and client satisfaction. Far and away, the most effective way to achieve those nowadays is through technology.

Our firm is currently 98% in the cloud, which allows increased mobility for our employees and our clients. Some small firms don’t realize they’ve set up a barrier if they still work siloed within a physical space — but that barrier is there. They may not want to take on a client or new hire because they’re too far away…and that client or new hire may not want to take on that firm because they’re too far away.

While we are now positioned to serve anyone, anywhere, we still choose our clients, staff and service areas carefully to maximize value to both our clients and team. Over the last 4 years, we’ve maintained double digit revenue growth, added two new office locations, sold off our IT services division, maintained strong employee retention, and successfully incorporated alternative staffing solutions.

Below, I’ll share how we have been able to manage growth, staffing and client experience through technology.

Opening New Office Locations

Sometimes things fall in your lap, and the key is to recognize when that happens.

Four years ago, we bought a firm in Columbus in early January. Crazy, right? This is a great example of how having the technology in place can make even the most difficult situation doable. We bought new hardware for the staff to mirror our normal workstation setups. Next, we simply acquired the software licenses and started intense training. By early February, the staff of the acquired firm were able to start preparing tax returns on our system. The volume of work was heavy that first year and once again, technology saved the day. While our Columbus staff was doing a great job, it was difficult for them to keep pace with the volume of work coming in. Since we have an entirely cloud-based system with workflow tools in place, we had our staff from other offices step up and pull tax returns from the Columbus workflow pool and assist in tax preparation.

The ability for us to share resources across the entire firm and between office locations has been invaluable and contributes to greater efficiencies and better client service.

Our client base in Columbus grew so fast that we quickly saw there was more opportunity than we’d initially realized. We started looking around and noticed that, while there were a lot of firms in the area, they weren’t doing the type of advisory work we do. So, the Columbus area ended up opening the door to adding yet another location in Seymour a couple years later. We had a client in Seymour that had a large building with an empty suite on the corner. We do their controllership work and were visiting their office once a week, and we saw that spot and thought…there’s potential there. We asked about it, and they gave the green light to rent it out. We opened a new office in the client’s space in November 2022, right before tax season. And it was a seamless transition because of the technology we already had in place.

One of our partners, Lisa Tressler (also an INCPAS board member), is down there now helping run the marketing to get that up and running. So far, so good!

The only thing on our minds for in-office logistics was: Can we connect to the internet, and how fast is it? Then we bought the hardware and were able to “plug-and-play” with just one wire from our laptops to the multiple monitor setup.

While these cases all seem too easy to be true, they didn’t come without several years of technology investment and a constant mission to improve the systems we had in place. That mission continues today and at an even faster pace.

Making Growth Manageable

Scrutinize your services

Look at what’s working and what’s not. For example, we just recently sold off our IT Services arm, which cuts our employee base a bit but frees up the rest of our staff and brainpower on the more valuable services in our firm.

The IT Services revenue was flat compared to our accounting and advisory services, plus some of our IT staff was nearing retirement and it felt impossible to replace them. Meanwhile, our lead consultant had his own entrepreneurial spirit and lifetime goal to run his own business and was looking for his own venture. So, we transitioned the IT arm to the consultant, and he’s still got a desk here to help when we need it.

Choose (and cut) clients with care

At this point, we're culling clients and cheering when we replace them with “the good ones.” The clients that want more advisory work, the quarterly reports, the calls with graphs and charts, and all that great stuff that requires expertise and discussion. We are starting to give the client what they actually want and not just what they must have.

Use tech and time for staff retention

We have a strong retention rate, and I believe that’s due to our technology and flexibility. Employees expect that now — not just young people. Give them the tools they need for efficiency, and the space to use the time savings as they see fit. From May to December, we give our employees a flexible four-day work week and the option to work remotely one day a week during tax season.

Explore alternative staffing solutions

To provide client advisory services well, you need dedicated staff. We were sprinkling our CAS work out across staff for a while, but during tax season that just doesn’t work. They can’t be doing corporate finance returns on top of everything else. So, we hired a non-credentialed professional to manage the CAS department to help compartmentalize those services.

We also have our first offshore hire working from the Philippines. She started by helping with bill pay and bank reconciliations, and she's doing so well that we’re already transferring more work over to her. This has turned out to be a very time- and cost-effective hiring alternative for us. Instead of having job postings listed in perpetuity and receiving hundreds of applications from people with no experience, I can just email our contact and receive video introductions from qualified hires in my inbox by tomorrow. The primary benefit for this strategy is to free up professional staff to work on higher level services, including advisory work.

Finally, we have a summer intern. Some firms don’t hire in the summer because they “don’t have anything for them do” since tax season has passed. We had thought about our team’s wish list well in advance and made sure we had projects ready that would carry him throughout the summer and us throughout the year. Currently, he’s helping make technology work for us by updating and uploading client document request documents in SuraLink so they’re already pre-populated for our staff when we go in to work on those projects next year. SuraLink is one of our recent technology additions that we use to secure documents from business clients.

How to Identify When a New Tech Tool Can Help Your Firm

I find there are four ways we usually encounter technology:

1. Something “shiny” comes across your desk and you check it out, but it’s not really meaningful.
2. It’s discussed as part of a strategy or solution. At our annual retreat a couple years ago, the focus was on client experience. Asking ourselves: Does this look archaic? Is it a pain to use? How does this present us as a firm of the future?
3. Efficiency. You know what you’re doing is taking too much time, and there has to be a better way to do it.
4. Conferences. I go to the AICPA ENGAGE Conference every year to visit each vendor booth and ask them to tell me what they do and what they can do for us. Sometimes these discussions are only two minutes — other times, two hours. This gives you a chance to determine what’s flashy versus what’s good…and the good ones can change EVERYTHING.

Advice to Small Firms

I've been out on peer reviews and see what some small firms are doing and how they’re doing it.

The partners headed for retirement sometimes quit investing in technology because they plan to leave. They think they’re saving money, but it’s actually destroying their sale prospects.

If I was looking to buy a firm, I’d be looking at their staff — not their clients. No one wants to buy an outdated firm or inherit a staff that uses outdated processes because they haven’t been exposed to the tools available. It's a shame to build a firm, staff and client list for years, but still be doing everything manually.

I encourage these firms to see what’s out there. And you can’t decide to buy a new technology and then just drop it on someone’s desk — that’s like buying a hammer and thinking the nails are going to hammer themselves. You have to do the demos and training and then re-engineer your processes to yield a more efficient process. You need a Champion of that software in your firm.

Recommended Tech Tools for Small Firms

We’ve implemented a lot of technologies at our firm, and some have performed better than others simply because they’re not new products and the provider has had time to work out the kinks and make needed upgrades.

Here are some of our latest technologies and places you can start:

Tax Caddy. This has definitely improved our workflows and efficiencies with some of our individual tax clients. The software allows our clients to upload documents based on a customized request list from the prior year plus answer all those normal tax organizer questions. This is a SurePrep product and satisfies the “gather” function for them and links directly into their next “organize” phase.

SurePrep. With staffing issues we are all experiencing, software such as SurePrep are getting a lot of attention. This can take you from the gather phase, to organize, to populate, and verify if you chose to do so. We are strongly considering moving up to the organize phase this year. Since we are a user of Ultra Tax and Thomson Reuters bought SurePrep, we are watching closely to see how tight the integration will be and what APIs will do going forward.

Suralink. We use this to send secure electronic document requests and also to track accountability for our business tax and assurance clients. I also use this exclusively for conducting peer review engagements. The dashboard on the landing page will show us whether and how much a client has responded so we can: 1) keep them on task or 2) not start something we can’t finish or get close to finishing.

Ignition. We use this to generate and save proposals and engagement letters. It took some time to set up, but the payoff is now, in Year 2, when it’s saving our team a lot of time.

Safe Sender Organizer. Our rollout with this one didn't go well because the software was new, but we were at the very least able to make and send fillable PDFs. We made the decision last year to move to Tax Caddy.

SafeSend Returns. This could be one of our favorite pieces of technology. We use this to deliver a tax package to the inbox of our individual and business clients. It’s a complete delivery system and includes the tax returns, efile signatures, digitized source documents, tax estimates, payment vouchers, and our invoice. We are approaching our fourth year using this product and anticipate some great integrations and APIs to make the delivery and e-filing process much more efficient. One of the really cool things about it is that we have many clients now that only receive this email delivery and nothing else. We give them their source documents back as a PDF within SafeSend Returns. This means no mailing or postage associated with their highly confidential information.

Overall, just remember: especially if your staff is really small — how are you going to grow? With technology, that’s how. But you must invest in it. Getting that new tech is just the beginning. That software is just code. It’s up to you to truly build that into your workflow and make your work better, faster.