What CPAs Want

Many advisors find it hard to form an effective alliance with a local CPA firm. Here’s some new information that should help.

How many CPA firms do you know? More important, how many are you working with to develop your practice? If the answer is “none” it’s time to make alliances with CPAs a key part of your business building efforts.

Here’s why: Almost 82% of wealth manager’s report that referrals from other professionals, such as CPAs, are their #1 source of new clients. What’s more, referrals from accountants are a key driver of these wealth managers ‘success. The same percentage (almost 82%) told us their five best new clients were the result of referrals from CPAs. Nothing else compared!

One reason is that advisors don’t know what CPAs really need and want. The conventional wisdom is that CPAs often distrust financial advisors and don’t want to work with them. However, we believe that over the past decade that Table Bay Financial has developed a unique program to form strong alliances with accountants in your communities. Here are some of our key findings over the past decade.

First, most CPA firms desire to take a collaborative approach to offering wealth preservation services to their clients. This means that they are extremely interested in partnering with the “right” financial advisor. At the end of the day CPAs do not want to sell products and services to their clients, rather they want to take a team approach in offering their clients these critical services. Most importantly CPA firms are interested in helping your clients eliminate heavy, immediate, and unnecessary taxation that can destroy their retirement programs. Recently CPAs have also become aware of and concerned about the devastating effects that a long-term care illness on the client or spouse can have on the ultimate success of the retirement program.

Working collaboratively with an advisor who is highly skilled and trained in distribution planning to provide their clients with beneficiary reviews, custodial reviews, guaranteed income strategies, and protection from long-term care events are currently driving significant new business opportunities for the CPA. When examining non-tax -related revenues for CPA firms we find that the average firm working in a fully collaborative environment utilizing a systematic approach are generating on average $660,000 of new annual revenues.

Firm’s willingness to turn to outsiders is a response to market factors such as increasing complexity of financial products, Social Security issues, and greater client challenges due to market volatility. The top five reasons that CPA’s site for seeking these alliances are as follows:

1. The alliance partner provided them a turn-key marketing and practice management program.
2. The alliance partner was willing to commit resources to help them incorporate wealth preservation strategies into their existing tax practice.
3. The alliance partner was able to help them identify critical issues their clients face and how to effectively communicate those issues to the client along with a resolution.
4. The alliance partner provided systematic and ongoing high-level training regarding tax issues related to distribution planning.
5. The alliance partner was a recognized “expert” in life insurance and IRA distribution planning with respect to effective tax planning for clients and specifically clients nearing retirement.

It is also important to know that the CPA focuses on wanting to partner with top advisers who bring a significant set of resources along with them. Therefore, it is imperative for the advisor to be seen as part of a larger scale operation than simply their own local advisory firm. The CPA wants to be assured that the advisory bringing more to the table than simply an ability to sell product to their clients. Therefore, for advisors who are serious about building strong alliances with CPAs they must partner with a firm that is focused on and devoted to assisting CPAs build their practices. This is why we believe so many CPA referral programs fail because CPA determines quickly that the advisor and the firm to represent only has interest in accessing their database to sell more product. While the CPA is and should be interested in revenue generation opportunities their first concern will be practice building considerations and client retention issues that the advisor can help them with.

If you are interested in learning more about Table Bay’s CPA Advantage Edge Program™ please give Samantha Mayer a call at 866-225-1786.