Starting and Building Your Own Accounting Business

By Jack Fox and Charles Fox

Book Overview

This Second Edition of Jack Fox's celebrated guide is expanded and updated to reflect the growing importance of personal computers and client prospecting. It's still the only book that tackles every aspect of building a successful accounting business--not just marketing. Fox leads you step-by-step through the crucial early decisions that will shape your business for years to come. He provides an action plan to help you through your first three months--the do-or-die period for any business--and a broader-based plan to guide you for the remainder of the first year. Numerous ready-to-use charts and forms save you lots of legwork and help you jump right into your practice. This complete and authoritative source enables you to overcome every obstacle to your success--one problem at a time. You'll learn how to: Develop a business plan. Choose a location that will help your business grow. Select computer hardware and software that best suit your business needs. Make sales calls that leave a lasting, positive impression on clients. Recruit and hire staff. Decide whether you need a CPA certificate. Set fees, time billings, and collect payments without alienating clients. Project cash flow. Buy or sell an existing practice.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 047115380X
• ISBN13: 9780471153801
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.1" x 6.1"

Customer Reviews

Just what I've been looking for...

Having been recently laid off, I am now looking into starting my own accounting practice. I am a CPA, but have no public accounting experience. I bought this book as part of a CPE course and was truly amazed at the wealth of information it contains, especially on marketing. It gave me some great ideas on areas to pursue and I know I will refer back to it many times over the next few months and even beyond.

Some of the Author's Thoughts

Yogi Berra had said that ..."when you come to a fork in the road...take it". In the same vein, I think that there can be no business without clients. I have learned from my more than twenty year accounting business journey that the type and number of clients you attract, serve and retain is in direct relation to the caliber of associates and vendors with whom you partner.The success of the first edition of this book and more importantly, the successes of its many readers encouraged me to concentrate my professional endeavors on providing accounting practice development services. After conducting more than a thousand seminars and workshops, I continued to search for ways to share the extensive practical knowledge garnered from researching and interviewing thousands of accountants who had achieved varying degrees of success and failure. Success and failure are not opposites but are inter-related components. One does not succeed without encountering failures along the way and persistence and the ability to profit from failure are the DNA of success.This, the third edition, shares the current developments that address every accounting and consulting professionals' specific skills, interests, personality traits, hopes, and dreams that no seminar, boot camp or practice development book, no matter how good, has been able to adequately address.My book launches the formation of The Accounting Guild, a unique accounting marketing consortium and a personal professional coaching program conducted by the author which brings a new threshhold of opportunity within the grasp of the entrepreneurial accountant and consultant.I appreciate your readership. For just as there can be no business without clients, there is very little purpose, for books without readers. I wish you Godspeed on your exciting journey, no matter what fork you take.

Low Price is Misleading

Jack Fox provides everything I ever wanted to know about building a successful accounting business. To think that I almost didn't buy this book because of the low price that made me wonder about just how good it could be when most of the other books in the accounting genre are so expensive. I can only surmise that the publisher did not read the section Fox wrote about value pricing. Had they done so, this book would be three times the price and still worth every cent. The author's treatment of selling techniques for the nonsalesperson is just as appropriate for consultants and resellers as it is for accountants. Product and service presentations and techniques earn this book a place on my desk for ready reference. In addition, the excellent readability and almost conversational tone make the book invaluable. This book provides such success essentials that I have told many of my colleagues in accounting and consulting and the accounting vendor community that it is a must read. This is for everyone in accounting, other than my competition.

Accounting practice

This was a good thought-provoking book for anyone considering opening an accounting office. The content is primarily written from a marketing point of view, and some accountants may not like the go-get-em sales approach. Taken as a whole however, any accountant considering opening a practice can learn something worthwhile from this book.