Brian: How did you come up with the name The Lazy CPA?

Nick: When my wife became seriously ill in 1998, what I needed most was time to facilitate her recovery.  Part of that care was to move my family from California to Mississippi to be closer to our extended family for support.

I was the managing partner of a thriving tax practice in California, and could not take a sabbatical; I needed to find a way to free up my time while staying involved in the business and continuing to take exceptional care of my clients.

Necessity is truly the mother of invention.  Every activity on my plate was analyzed for value and I discarded many of the old legacy practices associated with our industry.  What I came up with was a new perspective of the value of systems and team-based services that kept me in the role of decision-maker and client manager.  My top clients and partners had direct access to me by cell phone, and all decisions were implemented by my on-site team.

When my wife recovered from her illness, I found I had more free time than ever before and focused on bringing expanded services to my clients. The cycle of free time and new services helped me create a unique and profitable lifestyle within the tax professional community.

I worked with my broker-dealer, Money Concepts Capital Corporation to help develop a series of educational seminars that would help CPAs add financial services to their tax practices the way I had.

Nick Hodges is The Lazy CPA

I spent about five years presenting new methods and concepts to an average of 3,000 tax professionals per year.  At one of the early seminars, I was jokingly introduced by Denis Walsh, the President of Money Concepts, as a lazy CPA – because I lived in Mississippi, worked five weeks a year in my tax practice in California, and took at least three family vacations a year while earning substantial amounts of money throughout the year. As I looked over that group of CPAs sipping their coffee and staring casually out the window, and knowing that CPAs are some of the most over-worked and under-loved professionals, I thought that I needed to catch their attention in a new way.

I responded to Denis’s introduction by saying that I was not just A lazy CPA, but I was THE Lazy CPA! We had such a great reaction to it that we just continued introducing me that way.  Many times an attendee would call my office and ask for “that Lazy CPA guy” because they couldn’t remember my name.

Brian: What sort of responses did you initially get from the name?

Nick: Continuing education courses are typically an opportunity for tax professionals to be out of the office and kick back for the day, detached from the presentation. After being introduced as THE lazy CPA, all eyes would be on me, suspicious and looking for any mistakes I might make in the presentation.

The point is, the moniker worked: everyone in the room was engaged, albeit angry at first.  That involvement created discussions that were lively and honest, with the attendees thinking about how my systems might work for them.

By the end of the presentations, many would come up and ask how we might create some sort of partnership.  This was, of course, impossible due to time constraints, but I felt good about being able to deliver new concepts and systems to them that would help them create better lives.

Brian: How have things changed (in the industry) since you started?

Nick: I’ve been sharing my story nationwide for about 10 years now.  When we first started providing seminars for adding financial services to the tax practice, we used to spend an hour or more on the question of the conflict of interests.

Since the AICPA has clarified this position, there is very little conversation on this topic any more.  Five years ago, the questions were about how to manage a tax practice to create more time; the result was my tax practice manual and training programs. Now, we are hearing directed questions about the practical application of HOW to add financial services to the tax practice.  We are seeing more and more CPAs adding financial services as a way to retain clients and improve their firm’s profitability.

At present, I am spending more of my time mentoring young CPAs in how to seamlessly provide tax, accounting, and financial services to our clients in line with what I’ve learned over the past decade.

Brian: What are some of the best tools you use for your practice?

Nick: Of course, I LOVE the tools provided by CPA Site Solutions!  I am happy with my website options, and have received positive comments of the professional look of the pages.

My clients use the calculators and enjoy reading the professionally prepared articles. We have been delivering our clients’ tax returns electronically through the on-line vault for years.  This means that we no longer print tax returns and we use a fraction of the toner, paper, and labor costs during tax season.

With the newsletter feature, I keep in touch with each and every client monthly. In addition, during the recent economic downturn, I was able to create and send a personal messages to them each week at no extra cost.  My clients loved it.

We also use their online Quickbooks and Payroll for many of my small business clients.  It has substantially streamlined how we deliver our bookkeeping services.

Other tools I use are Emoney Advisor as the platform for my financial planning operation.  I use Jennings Seminars live and streaming continuing education.  Money Concepts is my broker-dealer and delivers key online resources and other training in delivering financial planning to my clients. In addition, I have an internal operations manual that we keep in a constant state of update and revision as we refine our methods and systems.

Brian: Advice you would give a fellow CPA?

Nick: I am reminded of the scene from Alice in Wonderland when she meets the Cheshire Cat at a fork in the road.  She asks, “Which road do I take?”  He responds, “Where do you want to go?” When Alice answers, “I don’t know,” the cat replies, “Then, it doesn’t matter.”

My advice to my fellow CPA is to have a bold vision for not just your practice, but also for your lifestyle.  To challenge you to understand that the only one preventing you from living the lifestyle you truly want is you – trapped in old ways of thinking.  That there is always room for improvement in your systems and methodologies.  I’m hoping that like my moniker, The Lazy CPA, that readers will be upset and engaged enough after reading this to rethink what they’re doing and why.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

New CPA Site Solutions Events Blog

CPA Events. Events is a regular updated blog with CPA seminars, events, and webinars that are related to CPAs and other accounting professionals. You can check the events blog on a regular basis or subscribe to the RSS feed and get automatic updates. You can also submit your own CPA seminar or event.

How to Submit. The events blog is soon to have a form to submit your CPA seminar or event. For now just email support@cpasitesolutions.com with your CPA seminar or event details.

What You Can Find. You can find any number of CPA seminars, events, or webinars throughout the country or online all in one location. You can use the search or just look under a category.

iPhone Ready. The events blog and the regular CPA Site Solutions blog can now be viewed on an iPhone or iPod Touch. This makes it that much easier to read about any new tips and tricks for leveraging your CPA website.

Where is your favorite place to go to find CPA seminars, events, or webinars? Send a comment and share with other readers.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Giving Is Easy

Give and Grow Rich. That is the recent title of a blog post from Copyblogger. An unlikely place for a CPA and other accounting professional to go on the internet? Maybe, but the clear and touching message behind the post make it an excellent read for anyone.

Generosity Speaks for Itself. When you give without the need for something back, you gain. The generosity speaks for itself so you don’t have to. There may be nothing that comes of it but often you do gain in unexpected ways.

Free Content. There is all kinds of free content, like the Financial Guides, available to any website hosted by CPA Site Solutions. A person could come to any CPA website, grab that free content, and leave. Even so you are better off keeping this type of information available.

Free Tools. Along with the free content are free tools, like in the Tax Center of your CPA website. These again could be used and you could never gain a client from the experience. Again you are better off keeping these openly available.

Free Newsletter. There is also the free newsletter with fresh, useful, information each month. Some try to hide the newsletter, or any of these free items, in password protected pages. Yet that would be a mistake. You want visitors to have access to all this free information.

The Value of Your Expertise. In the end a visitor is not necessarily looking for any of those free things. They are looking for reasons to trust your CPA firm. They find that in the information you give for free.

In the end what they really want is the value of your expertise.

They want to trust the general value of what you have to offer. Once they have this, then they know they can trust you with their specific, and personal, situation. When that happens you have naturally converted a visitor into a client.

What do you think about giving information away for free? Do you have your own experience from something you have done on your CPA website? Send a comment below and share with other readers.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A Website is Your First Step but Not The Last

The classic word of mouth that you can get from people still goes further than any marketing dollar you can spend. This post is the start of a small series of posts dealing with your online image and how to increase and fine tune what is out there about your firm on the web.

Start with Your CPA Website. If you have a website hosted by CPA Site Solutions then you have tons of great resources and content that both potential and regular clients want to read. Even so it is beneficial as a previous posts touches upon, to make sure you make a number of the pages and ongoing content your own.

Social Platforms. Engage in social platforms like Twitter and Facebook in order to not only increase exposure but to join an ongoing discussion around your profession. The conversation is out there, the more you are not only aware of it but take part, the healthier your CPA firm becomes in terms of being known.

Blogs. Add a blog to your CPA Site Solutions website and update it on a regular basis as a way to provide fresh content for for search engines. There was a previous post on how to start your blog.

Help Others. Answer questions and help others online at certain key websites. There is a previous post that looks at one place to do this. Look for future posts regarding more online avenues to help others.

The key to being online is to engage in multiple sources of media. You can connect with both those that know about you and those that may be interested in your services.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.