Doctors and accountants are used to people asking them for advice in social settings. The best advice I ever received from a doctor wasn’t medical, it was about the health of my business.
I play golf with a local optometrist. Noticing how smoothly his practice ran, and how he was enjoying life much more than I was, I asked him to share his secret. Like any good doctor, he referred me to the correct specialist.
The secret to his success is Sterling. Fortunately they work with CPAs as well as doctors and now I have been able to achieve that same type of success.
When I went to Sterling’s offices in Glendale, California, to do the initial training, I’d already been operating my own practice for fifteen years after obtaining my accounting certification in 1972. I walked away with volumes of tremendously useful tools in a short period of time. The comprehensive training covered how to recruit, compensate and inspire staff; how to measure individual productivity; how to spend more time on high billing rate activities; and much, much more.
I developed a completely new understanding of sales and marketing. One of my key business goals is to provide the exact right services that will help my clients expand their businesses. At Sterling, I learned how to properly market these services and also how to better control communicating the benefits of these services so my clients could see how they were making an investment in their own business expansion.
Most importantly, I learned how to enjoy life more!
Using what I learned at Sterling, I put in procedures that eliminated bottlenecks in the office and made the whole place run much smoother. The billings went up about forty percent in the first three years, which isn’t bad for a practice that had been around for 35 years. But more important than the money is having the free time to spend with my family and do the things I love to do. Last year I took well over two months vacation, including going to Africa for three weeks with my wife and adult children. When I am in town, I have more time to spend exploring the creative side of my nature—playing guitar and writing and recording songs. My wife loves that I am able to spend more time with her, which has really enhanced our relationship.
Even tax season is no longer a nightmare. Instead of coming in at four in the morning, I arrive home in time for dinner, even though I take a two hour break for lunch. Because I don’t burn myself out during tax season, I don’t have that post season fatigue to recover from every spring. In fact, even during tax season I still have time to play a few rounds of golf with my optometrist friend who referred me to Sterling in the first place.
Howard Crane, CPA
