I have to sit and count how many ventures I have these days.  They are all variations on one theme:  how to make more money and pay less tax.  It’s something I’m passionate about and I can’t even find the words to explain how fulfilling it is when someone that I work with through my seminars, education and privately as a client goes on to not just meet their goals, but far exceed them.   That just feels good.  

My companies are largely virtual.  My husband has a small office for his assistant Rachel and for him.  I have a small office for Carolyn and me that also includes a recording studio that my son has now claimed as his office too.  But other than that, our team is scattered across 3 states.  We communicate via email and inhouse private forums.  You can get buried quickly if you’re not careful.

Here’s a couple of tips that work for us:

-  Create an inhouse private forum for questions/answer and procedures that more than one person will need to know.  For example, I am about to announce my new full service tax CPA office.  We are going to be completely virtual.  My partner in this venture, Bill, and I are not in the same office.  Neither are our first 3 employees.  This will be the 3rd CPA firm that I have started and I already know the challenges that we’ll face.  One of the questions will be how to handle client questions and situations that are unique to the professional.  The old school method is to have each CPA research each question individually.  The client pays to educate his advisor.  And the advisors might come up with inconsistent answers.  One of the cool things about tax law is that it really is true “What would you like the answer to be?”  That means interpretation will depend on the education, experience and point of view of the advisor.  So, how do we create a better environment?

That’s where the forum comes into play.  Our professionals will post questions on the internal forum.  Both Bill and I will watch all entries (we’ll get alerts) and answer immediately through the forum.  That way all professionals will get the benefit of learning right away.  I’ll meet (again virtually) on a weekly basis to go over all client files with the professionals.  We’ll have a systemized way for reviewing progress on the client’s goals and our goals for them.  And we’ll be able to adapt plans as we go.

I’ve used similar programs for other companies but it was always on internal systems, not systems for our clients.  So, this will be a great expansion of the idea.  But, it will also mean that my email box is going to get flooded.

There are two rules that I have for emails:  I only get emails every 30 minutes (automatically set for that) and my goal is to keep no more than 10 emails in my inbox.  They are dealt with quickly and removed or saved to our client management software.  (By the way, I currently have 19 in my inbox.  10 is a goal…)