Have you ever been at the doctor’s office where the receptionist at the front window tells you, “hold on just a minute while I take this call”. Let’s analyze that a little bit. Everybody’s been through that, but I’m sure that can be frustrating for both parties.
First, you as the customer, were there talking to somebody and trying to resolve something. Now the phone is run and someone has jumped right in front of you to get their question answered. Is that really fair?
Well, we think there’s a better way, and we’ve used it for a long time in our firm. We don’t have a ringing phone in our office. We actually don’t accept phone calls.
You may be surprised by that, but then it’s very untraditional for a CPA firm. However, let me tell you what our solution is and why we think it’s better.
Sometimes I’ll record a video back to somebody if just a two or three sentence answer. Can’t resolve that to explain a little better, and also so you can see my face and get all of the benefits of physical contact to understand a message.
Also, a lot of us just aren’t into reading a long voluminous email when we need to just get to the root of an answer and get a question. Even though it may be more complex, we’re lazy. We don’t like to read that much.
Secondly, if you do have a concern where we need to have a little back and forth, you’re expanding your operations. You want to hire a new manager role, you wanna sell your business, you have some goals you want to achieve, and you need some help—those involve more than just an email conversation, so we’ll schedule a call.
That call and will not be on the phone. It’ll be a Zoom meeting. We use Zoom meetings, and we’ve been using them since long before COVID and long before it was cool.
We’ve been using Zoom meetings to communicate with our clients for over eight years now. It’s been a long time since we’ve had face-to-face meetings because our clients are located all throughout the country.
So our Zoom meeting is precious to us. It does a couple of things that a phone call can’t accomplish.
First, the obvious. We can share screens and show you things, look at financial numbers, look at how situations would work out. We have the option of having visual impact along with our audio communication.
Next, our meetings are at a scheduled time. They’re focused. When I have a meeting with you, I will be 100% focused on that meeting. I’m not writing something, researching something on the internet, doing a tax return.
When it’s time to meet, I’m hands down, ready to talk just to you. You have 100% of my attention, and I will have 100% of your attention so that we can resolve your issues efficiently and very quickly so that you don’t have to wait.
Next up, the other part that we really love is we record every Zoom meeting with our clients. That meeting is accessible by our clients, by you, as well as by me. Couple of things. If I talk to five people in one day, I don’t wanna be the one who gets confused about what we talked about.
I’m not perfect by any means. However, I can go back and pull up our conversation and rewatch it. I can refresh myself on what we talked about.
Also, how many times have you been to the doctor and you come out of the doctor’s office after he is told you a whole bunch of things and you get home and you say, “well, I can’t remember what he said about that”, or “he called it something, but I don’t remember”.
Well, you don’t have to be focused on taking thorough notes throughout our meeting because you’ll be able to rewatch our conversation too in case you forget or if you’re in the implementation phase and you wanna be able to walk through something step by step.
We also transcribe our meetings in most cases, so they’re easily searchable. So if I said, “Hmm, I had a conversation about somebody working with this insurance company and we had a resolution to it, who was that?” Not to worry. I could search through my conversation history and figure out who it was so that we can use that knowledge to make your business better and to help you answer your questions.
So if you really kinda like the old style of traditional telephone calls, dropping off things, mailing things, we might not be the place for you.
Our firm is more advanced in looking at innovative ways to make sure that our business owners have access to us and all of our brain power without having to deal with the interruptions of a phone ringing or of having to look for paper that’s manually sent to us.
If you are looking for a solution that is efficient and innovative and allows you to have that type of conversation with your CPA, I’d be happy to talk to you.
For additional read: Looking for a Local CPA
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Donna Bordeaux, CPA with Calculated Moves
Creativity and CPAs don’t generally go together. Most people think of CPAs as nerdy accountants who can’t talk with people. Well, it’s time to break that stereotype. Lively, friendly, and knowledgeable can be a part of your relationship with your CPA, as demonstrated by Donna and Chad Bordeaux. They have over 50 years of combined experience as entrepreneurial CPAs. They’ve owned businesses and helped business owners exceed their wildest dreams. They have been able to help businesses earn many times more profit than the average business in the same industry and are passionate about helping industries that help families build great memories.