By Andy Frye
One of the biggest dangers for us as tax professionals is becoming “too busy to be successful.”
We work so hard, at the beginning of our careers, to build up enough of a client base to earn a decent living. And then all of a sudden we have more work than we can handle.
Once you reach that point, you find that you’re always busy “putting out fires” and performing XYZ client work, and it becomes terribly difficult hard to prioritize what’s truly important to your long-term success. You find yourself running faster and faster. But where, exactly, are you going?
Defining Your Success
In our experience, we find three primary reasons why people become a tax professional:
- Want to discover the secrets of the tax code so that we can help people, including helping ourselves and our families
- Want to make the most amount of money in the least amount of time (tax season)
- Want flexibility with your schedule, to spend time with family, hobbies, etc. (not tax season)
Usually it’s all three of these that we want.
For YOU, though, which of these goals is most important?
Even more important, how can you create synergy between these three goals?
What is YOUR definition of success?
All too often, we let OTHER people define success for us.
We must define success in our own terms if we have any hope to achieve it.
Visualize Your Success
I highly recommend to go beyond just defining your success into actually visualizing your success.
What does a “successful career” look like for you?
For me, a successful tax career means:
- Using my talents to empower other people to be successful
- Making money even when I am not working, i.e. not “tied to a desk”
- Building up “asset value” of my businesses (systems, trained-up team members, etc.) so that the businesses themselves have value beyond my own efforts
A “perfect day,” for me, then, occurs when I see other people having jobs and opportunities because of my efforts, we’re selling products and services while I’m at the beach with my wife and kids, and my teammate suggests a small improvement to our customer service system and we implement that improvement immediately.
Are most days perfect days?
Not even close! 🙂
But when I keep my eyes on the prize, on what I really want my life to be, I find that my days start to more closely resemble my vision.
“Levels” to the Tax Game
As we’ve started adding more and more courses to our Pronto Tax School Platform, I’ve been thinking through where we want to help our customers go.
I want to make sure that we’re actually helping you get somewhere, not just sitting here trying to sell you stuff.
It’s not an accident that the home page of our website shows people climbing a rocky mountain. In case you haven’t noticed, we are climbing a rocky mountain right now in this tax business. It’s a strenuous process.
Where are we going?
What’s at the top of this rocky mountain?
Here’s as far as I’ve gotten on what the pyramid of our business looks like:
I know that the top level of the pyramid, The Promised Land, includes:
- Being able to generate year-round income, at will
- Leading a team (making money with other people)
- Leaving a legacy that lives on beyond your own career
I’ve seen the top people in our business, and this is what they do, and it is good.
The middle level, however, is a bit of a gray area in my mind (that’s why it’s gray in this pyramid)…and that’s where most of us get “stuck.”
I know for a fact that ascending to the top level entails enhancing your sales skills as a tax professional and that’s why we created our new Sales Training for Tax Pros course, the only sales training program on the planet made exclusively for tax professionals.
But there’s more to it than just getting better at sales and marketing.
What does this second level “gray area” look like?
And how do we go beyond it?
Send us your feedback through the Pronto Tax School Facebook Page.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
If you like learning about taxes and advancing your tax career, check out our online tax courses that help you keep climbing–while keeping The Promised Land in mind.
