Deadlines Are Important

My tax accounting clients are very busy these days because September 15, 30, and October 15 are important filing deadlines. Their staff are busy preparing the returns and their clients are counting on them to deliver. If you don’t think their work is important, see what happens when a deadline is missed. Compliance documents submitted by the deadline matters.

Because this service is so important, firms are inclined to build their practice around a deadline-driven mindset, believing that meeting deadlines is what it’s all about. Over time, this approach is reinforced in their training, managing, measuring and reward systems. Collectively, they form a cultural mindset from which people learn what is a priority and how to behave.

A Deadline-Driven Cycle

As a result, a cycle evolves that looks like this: months before a deadline, client interaction is largely reduced to requesting, reminding, pestering, and sometimes threatening them for the information needed to complete the documents and meet the deadline.

Once the information is secured, they get to work and enter the “compression season.” Everything else in the firm is halted, tabled and delayed so that full attention is given to meeting the deadline—all hands on deck, long hours and a huge volume of work in a short time.

Finally, the deadline comes and goes, with everyone being exhausted and fully expended. Time off for a breather is essential. In fact, some firms close the office for days after the deadline so people can begin their physical and mental healing. Following this recovery stage, a short time elapses and the cycle begins again, where the client interactions are largely focused on securing information for the next deadline.

Compliance-deadline driven professionals get important work done. But clients are usually underwhelmed by all the effort and energy their professionals expend. They believe that their professionals glean nuggets of useful information from all their work that would help them with their business, and they resent never receiving it. This is a problem because professionals have more to offer but are so busy with other things, they never get around to sharing what they learn.

A Client-Driven Cycle

So what would happen if the cycle was altered and became client-value driven, where professionals had conversations with clients about what they found from the compliance work? What if the compliance documents were viewed as part of the data collection process to be analyzed for the client-value meetings? What if the end of the cycle was not the deadline, but a part of the process? What if the goal was to conduct client meetings to review the present and plan for the future?

This alternative mindset and approach will please clients immensely because they receive what is MOST important and MOST valuable to them. And professionals will enjoy applying their knowledge and experience in ways that are engaging, challenging and rewarding. And that, too, is MOST important and MOST valuable—much more so than only being compliance-deadline driven. Awesome.