Well, two comments/emails in as many days about “What happened?” and I moved blogging on this site as a priority.  I’m back!

There has been so much going on behind the scenes that I just kindof forgot about memoralizing it along the way.  

So, here’s the plan.  I’m going to go through the many moving pieces, one at a time, as a “here’s what’s happened, where’s what’s next, and my biggest ah-ha”.  

Let’s start off with some of the stuff that’s worked.  

I started my first CPA firm in 1991.  Wow, hard to believe it’s been that long ago.  It grew rapidly and I worked night and day until in 1995 I had reached the final burnout stage.  I sold it for a little less than a half million and spent more time on real estate investing.  That was before the crazy real estate times and so we made good money (not crazy wild money) doing rent to own properties.  

One of the handful of clients that I’d kept (Robert Kiyosaki) wrote a book and sky rocketed to huge success.  I did a lot of seminars with him and my business grew again.  So, I was back building a business. This time I decided I wasn’t going to get sucked into the day to day and so relied on others.  I ended up with uneven results.  I was never happy with our customer service and the employees I had seemed to have a real “what’s in it for me” type of attitude.  I didn’t pay enough attention to them in the beginning and the corporate culture got away from me.  So, just like before, I had a shelf life of about 5 years and sold my practice at the end of 2001.

I vowed I’d never have a tax firm again.  But I couldn’t stay away.  I was soon back doing tax strategies, which I absolutely love. Then the challenge was finding firms that would follow my strategies and do the tax prep and ongoing consultation.  I started off with 10 affiliated firm and ended up with 2.  

Then a whole series of events left my family in the spot where I needed to create some more income, and quickly.   I went back to what I knew - tax services.  But this time I spent more time designing how the work would flow, how to hire, how to work, in other words the BUSINESS.  In fact I spent more time doing that then figuring out how to get clients in the door.  

LESSON HERE:  The first time I did everything at the office.  The second time I did nothing.  This time, I’m designing and systemizing.

Now here is the amazing part.  Bill sent me the current financials yesterday and I almost fell off my chair.  This is working.  There’s more profit than I thought.  We have clients who are referring everyone they know because they are so happy with the services we provide.  We have independent contractors ONLY who are paid based solely on the project completion.  We can’t pay on results per se (save a client $10,000 in taxes and you get a percentage of that) because that is not allowed under the ethics of the AICPA.  But we do pay based on satisfied clients. And it’s completely scalable.  And it’s completely virtual.

LESSON HERE:  Get prepared to throw everything about the way you work out of the window.  Technology has dramatically changed how and where we work.  

Richard and I spent 4 hours this weekend going through the sales process and the stats.  We found that there are three conversion points in the sales process for clients.  And we also found that Richard was putting the most time and energy into the least productive conversion point.  It was a huge eye opener for both of us.  Hey!  This watching stats stuff really works!  I want to check back on that in 2 weeks to see what has transpired.   Increased emphasis on the part that brings the biggest paychecks should see more income soon.  And decreased emphasis on the part that is a time waster should mean a lot more free time for Richard.  

Now for my confession:  I remember a long time ago touring with Robert Kiyosaki and saying that I couldn’t figure out how NOT to be an S (self-employed person) with investments.  I have tried the business model before but unscrupulous partners pretty much burned me on that, at least the way I was doing.  Robert always told me to look at the model of the Big 4 firms.  How did they create businesses?  Basically they did it by marking up the hours and I didn’t want to do a firm that way.  So, how could I do it?  I think maybe we’ve finally found the answer.  

As I write this, sitting in our San Diego beach home, I can’t tell you how satisfied I am.  Maybe it is possible to get what you want.  This might just be the business I’ve always dreamed of having.