ProfitSee now a
member of the
National Registry
of CPE sponsors

Great news!  ProfitSee has been approved as a member of the National Registry of CPE Sponsors for Group Live and Group Internet-Based programming. We look forward to providing you with more opportunities to gain the knowledge you need to stay current and competitive in the industry.

We will soon announce our course offering schedule for 2012. We are excited to sponsor 50 minute webinars and half-day live workshops in cities across the US—including Minneapolis, Las Angeles, Seattle, Boston and Providence. Our courses will focus on the latest changes in the accountancy world and the key strategies for fiscal and asset management. Peter M. Vessenes, lead instructor and CEO of ProfitSee will share his expertise from over 30 years as a business turnaround specialist for Fortune 100 companies, startups and small-to-midsized businesses.

To learn more about ProfitSee’s course offerings and to get the latest updates on the course schedule, visit our website, Learning Market profile, or give us a call at 866-668-6510 ext. 205.

Regards,

Jaime Rengel

Client Support Specialist

ProfitSee, Inc

Building Your
Consultative Practice

The Client Experience:  What does that mean?  Why is it important?  How is it a fiscal management issue?  What can you do to help your business clients in this critical discipline?

The roller coaster ride of the national economy over the past decade has had a large impact on how people view the world, trust others, and spend money.  In most industries, the days of “pushy selling” are long over.  Today, whether a “sale” is business to business or business to consumer, the decisions are all made on whether people feel safe in the relationship.

Think of how Lexus changed the luxury car market.  Toyota makes a fine automobile in the Lexus line.  Toyota sold them below the “market price” of Mercedes and BMWs.  In its early years, Lexus added every “electronic do-dag” it had at its disposal as a basic part of the vehicle.  Despite all these fine attributes, the biggest weapon in the Toyota arsenal?  It was the experience at the dealership.

If you haven’t gone through the “facility walkthrough” at a Lexus Dealership, make a vow; get over to one, even if you are only “pretending” to shop for one.  Here is what you will find:

• The showroom floor is spacious and well appointed
• The vehicles are displayed as “works of art”
• You are treated as “royalty” and have the experience of a “valet” escorting you around
• The coffee you were being served was not Maxwell House in a Styrofoam cup
• The lighting, space, size and floor of the SERVICE DEPARTMENT is so spectacular, you would be certain you could eat a meal off of the floor without concern
• In the unlikely event your car is in for service for any prolonged period, you will receive a Lexus loaner car, not a Hyundai
• The list goes on and on…

In fact, the training for all personnel and OWNERS of the dealerships was so comprehensive; it took a year to get “approved” by Toyota so that you could open the doors.  The impact on Mercedes, BMW, Audi and other luxury lines was immediate and profound.

• Lexus captured a significant market share at the expense of all others
• Lexus was “the car to have” in the eyes of the luxury buying public
• Mercedes Benz went through a period of significant quality control issues on their cars in an attempt “overtake” the technology in a Lexus
• In fact, nearly every luxury car manufacturer has exceeded the Quality Standards Lexus absolutely DEFINED in its early years.
• Mercedes, BMW, Audi, and many other luxury car lines were forced to significantly upgrade the interior dealership, despite these dealerships being independent businesses only loosely able to be influence by the car manufacturer.
• People began to expect the “Lexus Experience” in ALL luxury car sales.

How far has the upgrade in the Client Experience gone?  Despite the fact that my wife and I have been exclusively German Car owners for over 25 years (other than an inherited American pickup truck…), when we opened offices in Providence, Rhode Island we felt the need to have a “local” car for the apartment.

After a lot of research, I felt great about getting a 2012 Ford Focus Titanium Sport Edition; a $25,000 vehicle.  We have not been disappointed: a fantastic “German Car” ride, both in the suspension and seating, over 37 miles per gallon on the highway, and, believe it or not, a true “Lexus Dealership” experience at a good old Ford Motor Company retail location.

What makes up a great “Client Experience”?  Certainly there are lots of elements, more than I can put in a short article, and absolutely enough to write a book about, but at a minimum

• No “Pushy” selling.  Sales come from trusted relationships.  Sales come from referrals from trusted relationships.  Sales come from “word-of-mouth” about what an incredible experience someone had.
• Every element in the experience is important, from the cleanliness of the physical location, to the cheerfulness of whomever is talking, to the quality of coffee (and water) that is served
• A deeply ingrained understanding that it is the service and benefits to the customer that is the only thing that matters, and that this touches ALL aspects of every department in a business
• A consistent, predictable, repeatable event for every single prospect and customer at every single point of contact.

Think about it in simple terms: if you were having a handyman work on your house and they showed up in a dirty tee shirt, torn jeans, and needing a shave for the past three days, would you have a high level of confidence in the labor that was about to be performed? Keep in mind- they might actually be a master craftsmen that lacks skills in hygiene, but the question is not what the actually can do; it is what you BELIEVE about them

Why is this a “Fiscal Management” issue? What does this have to do with you providing services in Accountancy?

The answer is a simple one. Most of your business clients trust you to give them financial advice. Upgrading the client experience can cost money. Making the money back can take time. Business owners “hate” change, especially when they don’t clearly understand the very “short-term” benefits.

You are the individual they can trust; you are the person they will believe when you tell them “they have to spend a little money to make a LOT of money”. You are the individual that can show them the cost/rate of return projection of making the change (through ProfitSee, of course!).

How do you bring this about? What should you do to create a project for your business clients that help them prosper?

• Set up a client “walk-through”.  Take the time to experience what the customers of your client go through.  If it is a physical location shopping experience, start in the parking lot, and walk through from there.  If it takes place from a direct salesperson effort, go through the process.
• Assess the experience.  Set your thoughts down on paper.  Evaluate methods and costs of improving the experience.
• Find out some basic sales/revenue information: What is the average value of a new sale?  How many sales are closed each month?  What is the burden carried in each sale?
• Run a scenario for what you have found out.  You can do this through Excel, or, the easy way, through ProfitSee
• Meet with your client.  Ask questions: Have you ever done (any of the strategies or tactics you thought might help)?  How did they turn out?  Did you do a cost/cash flow analysis of the project at that time?
• Take this information and build a presentation of your rational, the tactics, costs, and cash flow projections.
• Make the presentation to your client, including a reasonable calendar and “time to performance”.
• Offer to help monitor not only the financial performance but the project(s) also if they would be helpful.
• A consistent, predictable, repeatable event for every single prospect and customer at every single point of contact.

A Client Experience Project is the fastest way to help your business clients increase revenue.  Increase their revenue though this kind of a project and they will trust your future advice for a long time.

My next update will cover helping your business clients build their target market’s Top Of Mind Awareness…

 Rebuild the Economy, One Small Business At A Time

 Thanks to everyone!

Peter M.

How to build your
consultative practice

2012 Tax Season is just around the corner.  Many of your tax clients are probably small to mid-sized business owners, and undoubtedly, have gone through a challenging fiscal year.  My last email talked about not overlooking the simple things you can do to make a difference for your clients.  Today, I would like to take it up a notch to a slightly more involved level of service. It is at this time that most companies are trying to lay out some business plans for next year.   For most businesses you must “spend money to make money”, that is, they need to reinvest in strategies and tactics to help reach next year’s objectives.  Unfortunately, most small businesses are “busy being busy”, and do little if any planning for the coming year.  This is where you can make a difference… There are 4 key areas all businesses should evaluate annually for their future financial health.  These are:

Revenue Growth and Sales Strategies:

Granted, in today’s economy, many companies are more concerned about maintaining existing sales, but frankly, better companies understand that in bad economic times, their competitors are also suffering.  Based on a fair assessment of competitors’ client experience, quality of services, and things a simple as how many times each month do you “touch” your customers, better run businesses can often capture market share from their competitors more easily in Bear Markets than in Bulls.  Being a business owner can be a lonely experience.  Become the trusted advisor.   Take the time to let your clients talk to you about it; helping them financially succeed will come out of it!

Human Resources:

People are usually both the single largest expense and the single business asset you can increase a rate of return from.  Most businesses only view their team as an “expense” not an “asset”.  In this approach, efficiency can become the key problem, as the people on the bus may be in the wrong chair, they may be trying to ride in too many chairs, and, most likely, the bus does not have enough riders to maximize the profitability of the bus.  Have you talked to your business clients about the capacity of their team, and whether they can support even modest revenue growth?  30 years of helping businesses turn around in trying times has taught me that in most situations, making sure the company runs efficiently by enough staff doing the right things is the real way out of trying times, not cost cutting.  Be the sounding board for your clients to talk about their teams, and help them discover why most shifts with modest increases in overhead can create significant results in the bottom line.

Cash Flow:

Twelve years ago I was brought into a $15 million per year Services Company that consistently had a hard time not spending $15.1 million.  I will never forget the debate between the Marketing Director, (whose programs were doing a great job), leveraging for a larger budget, and the VP of Finance. Marketing Director: “Don’t you understand, that when it comes down to it, generating customers is the key to pulling us out of this?  Don’t you understand that marketing is EVERYTHING” VP Finance: “Marketing may be everything, but you have to understand, CASH is KING…” Very few business owners understand cash flow beyond, “there is money in the checkbook; times are good”, “there is not enough money in the checkbook; times are bad”.  Trends, seasonality, reinvestment for growth, excessive distribution to principles, and making a move that is “too little, too late” are all key elements of sound cash flow management.  Take on this role for your business clients.

Budgeting:

“What good are budgets anyway?  They are never accurate, I never look at them, and they business changes throughout the year- the company does not work on averages.”  Few businesses take the time to build an accurate budget, fewer of those that do understand what it is there for, and even fewer know how to make their budgets seasonal. Solid, well thought out budgets have a critical purpose in a business; they allow us to track our performance against our financial plan (the budget).  Take the time to help your business client’s build a solid budget (why not with ProfitSee®, that takes into account history, trends, and seasonality, as well as during the year adjustments?).  Help them monitor their performance monthly.  Advise them on what is actually happening while being a listening ear to their thoughts on the company.  Fulfill the role of their contracted CFO!

As always, we welcome your comments on our blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We also invite you to attend one of our upcoming CPE workshops. Sincerely, Peter M Vessenes CEO

Company update:
CPE and Sync

Thanks again for being a part of the ProfitSee family. We are glad to have you here and we are grateful to be part of the growth and development of your business or financial practice.

With so many interesting developments in our space we thought we’d use this post to give you some updates, both on ProfitSee and the industry as a whole.

Continuing Education

As we have worked with many Intuit ProAdvisors and large and mid-sized CPA firms, there is a universal acknowledgment that the industry is relentlessly moving toward value added services in financial management of client companies.  What has been more important is the limited experience most firms have in this emerging disciple.

My own professional background is made up of over 30 years of transitions and turnarounds of companies ranging from Fortune 100 Multi-nationals to small and mid-sized businesses.  ProfitSee itself is a result of how I did the financial modeling in those turnarounds, albeit in excessively large spreadsheets!

Based on this, we surveyed a number of you asking if you would find it valuable to attend a half-day workshop on not only how to make this type of consultancy part of your own business practice, but also how to sell and manage these services.

Your response was strongly positive.  As we moved towards holding this workshop we also investigated whether it would qualify for CPE Credits.  Gratefully, this workshop (and others to follow) DO!

We are in the process of finalizing national accreditation and following this up with state-by-state approval.  Until then, we have structured these trainings, both by webinar and by live workshops, to pass requirements for “non-certified” CPE, which professionals are eligible for in certain states.

For those of you in Minneapolis, we hope you can join us at one of our workshops at the end of October or beginning of November. Not in the area but interested? Let us know. We are working hard to expand our educational opportunities to other cities. But until then, keep checking our calendar for updates on future webinars.

Technology and Sync:
Many of you are aware of the challenges ProfitSee Pro has been facing.  Let me give a brief recap:

1.    ProfitSee Pro is unable to leverage the Intuit Sync tool for ProAdvisors, as the Intuit Workplace is not designed to simply support many companies through one subscriber
2.    Our Sync tool has faced a number of challenges due to (a) multiple file and data types from QuickBooks files and (b) challenges in resolving certain “logic” problems when files that we parse are missing certain data set elements. We currently have counted 14, (that’s right, fourteen) possible variations on QuickBooks files we have to parse… (Ouch)
3.    Managing how potential future syncing failures are dealt with by ProfitSee

In short, sync is hard. Doing it on a budget is harder. I am getting daily updates on our sync tool status, and will keep updating you all (roughly weekly) on our status.

This week, I’m watching balance sheets with embedded classes get properly parsed, which is exciting. Next on the list is testing edge-cases with account parsing. (What if we see a new account name that comes with an old account ID and the company name has been changed? You get the idea.)

Questions? Let us know by posting a comment below or by connecting with us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Best,
Peter M. Vessenes, CEO
ProfitSee Inc.

The Changing Accountancy World

Join ProfitSee for a half day workshop for ProAdvisors, CPAs, and financial service providers. We will discuss the challenges and opportunities facing small business owners in the next ten years, and how your firm can help.

In this workshop you will learn strategies for:

Expanding service offerings

Growing your practice

Closing more business

Register Today.

Instructor: Peter M. Vessenes, CEO of ProfitSee Inc and Vestment Advisors Inc. A popular platform speaker, and co-author of Building Your Multi-Million Dollar Practice, Peter has worked with and coached companies of all sizes, from fortune 100 to start-ups since 1983. His strategies in fiscal and asset management, strategic planning, organizational development, human resources and the client experience have helped thousands of businesses define and reach their objectives while building healthy cultures.

The Changing Accountancy World

Join ProfitSee for a half day workshop for ProAdvisors, CPAs, and financial service providers. We will discuss the challenges and opportunities facing small business owners in the next ten years, and how your firm can help.

In this workshop you will learn strategies for:

Expanding service offerings

Growing your practice

Closing more business

Register Today.

Instructor: Peter M. Vessenes, CEO of ProfitSee Inc and Vestment Advisors Inc. A popular platform speaker, and co-author of Building Your Multi-Million Dollar Practice, Peter has worked with and coached companies of all sizes, from fortune 100 to start-ups since 1983. His strategies in fiscal and asset management, strategic planning, organizational development, human resources and the client experience have helped thousands of businesses define and reach their objectives while building healthy cultures.

ProfitSee and
ProfitSee Pro:
the basics

In our last blog post we introduced ourselves and told you a little bit about why we are here. At ProfitSee, we believe that in order to be a successful business owner or financial advisor, you must have a solid understanding of the past, present, and future financial health of your company or your client’s company.

That’s why we started ProfitSee, an all in one financial analysis tool for business owners and financial advisors. Through all-in-one dashboards and easy to read reports, ProfitSee  can give you a solid understanding of where your business stands today, where it will be tomorrow, and what steps you can take to ensure profitability. After 20 years of consulting small startups and corporate sized businesses in fiscal and asset management, I wanted to create a product that would address the problems that I saw my clients experiencing everyday.

Here are a few features that make ProfitSee powerful for business owners:

• Quick and easy budgeting – An advanced budgeting tool can build you a new budget 15 minutes while reflecting seasonal expenses, future initiatives and owner compensation.
• What-if scenarios- What will happen if you change your product pricing, or hire more salespeople, or take out a loan? ProfitSee can answer these types of questions and more in a matter of minutes.
• Visualize your profitability – Literally see your company’s performance graphically over time for the kind of confidence you need to make solid business decisions.
• All-in-one dashboard – The Dashboard tells you good and bad news, and shows your business’ performance against your plan or budget.

After the launch of ProfitSee it became clear that we could do more to address the needs of CPAs, financial advisors, and professionals that manage the financials of multiple businesses at one time. That spurred the birth of ProfitSee Pro, a program that can manage the financial data and extract talking points for multiple clients.

Here’s how ProfitSee Pro will strengthen your role as a trusted financial advisor:

• Risk Ranking- When you list all of your clients on ProfitSee Pro, the program will rank each one based on their financial performance on an easy to read side tab. That way you will know who needs immediate attention.
• Daily Monitoring- Assess the financial health of your clients for the next forty days. By syncing with your client’s accounting data through QuickBooks, ProfitSee Pro will let you know how much cash your client will have tomorrow, next week, or next year.
• Overview and analysis- ProfitSee Pro provides a comprehensive overview of your client’s account history, including revenue, variable, fixed expenses, owner compensation, and year-to-date cash flow in easy-to-read graphs. Pro will also assemble the most important talking points to share with your client.
• Automatic Charts and Reports- Export reports and charts into a PowerPoint to send to your clients in seconds.

Those are a few of my favorite features. I invite you to learn more about ProfitSee and ProfitSee Pro by joining our monthly webinars, or by giving Pro a spin. In fact, you can test your first client on ProfitSee Pro today for free, by signing up for a 12 month trial of ProfitSee Pro on our website. Once you submit your trial request—we’ll give you a call and get your data synced.

Best,

Peter M. Venesses

About Multi-Company
Support, QuickBooks,
Intuit and ProfitSee

We’ve been receiving some incredible excitement at our recent ProfitSee Pro (Multi-Company, for ProAdvisors, CPAs and Bookkeepers) product recently, and also some major complaints from some.

The excitement is pretty easy to understand, I think. Being able to see how all your clients are doing in one easy interface, getting daily risk assessment scores for them, and generating PowerPoint reports automatically per client is huge; it’s a giant leap forward for selling and service for bookkeepers and CPAs, and I’m really excited about it — our customers seem to be as well.

I suppose then that when we fail, there is more likely to be bitter disappointment, and that’s also been happening a bit lately. Usually what happens when we have a disappointed customer is we have trouble syncing the data they want to sync.

This is frustrating for us, since we lose a previously excited customer, and super frustrating for our customers who have been ready to try it, and then discover that we’re unable to provide the data sync they need.

I’m sorry. I want to provide better sync, I promise. Many millions of dollars of money (ours and Intuits) are going to this problem; despite this, we still need to get better.

I wanted to walk through the current options for multi-company syncing and discuss the benefits and downsides of each of them, as a way for our customers to know what the current state of the art is, and where we hope to be. As always, I like feedback and good ideas, so I’m hoping to generate some useful conversation as well.

As it stands, here are the options for syncing multiple QuickBooks companies into one application:

1. Use Intuit Data Services to Sync up each individual company, and sign up each company for an application at http://marketplace.intuit.com. You will then have one subscription per company file at the Intuit Marketplace.

2. Use our Sync tool to sync up as many files as you like from your local servers, and sign up with us (or Intuit) for a “master” subscription. You will then have one subscription total.

Here’s a list of benefits / features from going each route:
 

As I peruse the list, there is no clear winner. The reality is that Intuit did not create the Marketplace and Workplace with the needs of ProAdvisors in mind — the original use cases were almost always “One user, One Company.” We know that’s not where most of you live.

That’s not the only decision point for figuring out how to buy ProfitSee and Pro, though. If you bought ProfitSee Pro through Intuit, you can currently only use our sync tool. If you bought ProfitSee through Intuit you can only use Intuit Data Services.

To make matters more confusing, Intuit has just released a third sync technology called Intuit Anywhere. I’m really excited about it; it’s a great system. Unfortunately, with our current setup, adding a third option would make everybody’s head explode. This development has, along with some vigorous user complaining, convinced us that we need to revamp this system in a way that makes sense for our users (and frankly even our internal support staff).

So, what’s the new uber-system? Unfortunately, I can’t tell you — we’re just working on it now; Intuit Anywhere was released to beta two days ago — but I can promise it’s a high, high priority. Watch this space for more, and thanks for bearing with us.

Peter J. Vessenes, CTO, President, ProfitSee

peterj@myprofitsee.com

–

Peter J Vessenes

President, CTO, ProfitSee, Inc

myprofitsee.com

@myprofitsee

The Changing ProAdvisor World

Join ProfitSee for a half day workshop for ProAdvisors, CPAs, and financial service providers. We will discuss the challenges and opportunities facing small business owners in the next ten years, and how your firm can help.

In this workshop you will learn strategies for:

• Expanding service offerings
• Growing your practice
• Closing more business

Register Today.

Instructor: Peter M. Vessenes, CEO of ProfitSee Inc and Vestment Advisors Inc. A popular platform speaker, and co-author of Building Your Multi-Million Dollar Practice, Peter has worked with and coached companies of all sizes, from fortune 100 to start-ups since 1983. His strategies in fiscal and asset management, strategic planning, organizational development, human resources and the client experience have helped thousands of businesses define and reach their objectives while building healthy cultures.

Welcome to our new
website

Welcome to the ProfitSee blog. In our first blog post we would like to tell you a little bit about who we are and what we have to offer. Our mission is to help you—the professional accountant, financial advisor or business owner—receive actionable financial insights to help grow your organization. How can we do that? By offering software tools that can present your financial data or your clients’ financial data in a way that is easy to understand. Our financial analysis tools will help you to make business and financial decisions based on intelligent foresight. With ProfitSee, you’ll never again miss a warning sign or an opportunity. Read more