January, 2010 archive
Look to Your Accountant For More Than Number Crunching 0
Accountants have always been extremely important to any small business. They can help balance the budget, and they can wave a warning flag if they spot any expenses getting out of hand. They are also crucial to a business for helping to prepare and file taxes, and they must always be consulted before any new project is taken on. Indeed, no one within a business has more intimate knowledge about the inner workings of it or is more crucial the overall business development than the accountant.
Traditionally, however, the accountant hasn’t ever really received very much respect. He was basically regarded as a number cruncher who was mostly expected to sit in front of his calculator and add up all the payroll expenses. No one in their right mind would ever approach an accountant for advice about how to better run the business. What does an accountant know about marketing, sales, or management?
In the past few years, a new trend has been taking place. As businesses have been forced to become more efficient and to streamline themselves, they have been demanding more out of their accountants. Rather than someone who merely counts the beans and constantly veto new projects, they needed someone who actually contributed a bit more to the overall operation. Otherwise, why couldn’t they just replace this robot with a good piece of accounting software?
One of the biggest sources of this change has come from new businesses. Startups are usually created by young entrepreneurs with fresh ideas about how a business should operate. They aren’t married to the old model of simply using an accountant as a calculator. They wanted him to actually know something about business. They wanted him to be able to study the numbers and to be able to come up with ideas of his own about how to improve sales or why one marketing campaign is working better than another.
He might be able to spot a managerial problem when he sees that the productivity of one department is significantly lower than the company average but he should have solutions about how to solve that problem. In the past, an accountant might be able to spot a problem like this, but then he would recommend that a small business consultant come in to try to improve the situation. The accountant might even be able to help in the area of management succession planning if he can identify the type of manager that normally gets the best results within the organization.
As businesses demand expanded services from their accountants, more and more of this new breed are entering the workforce. This is truly the next-generation of accountants. They are not only good with numbers, but they are business savvy and creative. If the old-school accountants want to compete with these guys, then they had better step up their game.
An Easy Method For Keeping Your Branding Consistent 0
Unless you consciously think about your brand style as you create marketing and design materials, it’s very easy to lose the consistency of your brand. In fact, very quickly, you can end up with a website that doesn’t quite match your leaflets or brochure which don’t quite fit with the look of your stationery which doesn’t then quite match your invoice layouts! You then have an unrelated group of items that when seen in close succession by your customers, might make you appear less professional than you could be.
Here’s a simple tip for making sure your branding always remains consistent…
Step one, start by identifying something within your marketing items that you do like the style and design for, such as your website or a leaflet or a brochure (if you can’t find anything you like, then I would recommend you have one of those items re-designed until you have a ‘look’ that you like).
When you have something you like, let’s say you like the design of your website – this website design now becomes your branding benchmark. Step two, pick out between four and eight specific aspects of your benchmark design that you like. These could be colours, font types, a particular style of shading, the look or shape of certain graphics, perhaps aspects of your logo layout… the choice is up to you.
This list of items we call your design anchors, and these should appear across all of your marketing materials, leaflets, brochures, etc. In other words, if you then produce a leaflet, that leaflet should include the majority of those design anchors within the layout, so even at a glance, the reader can see the similarities from your website and the new leaflet. They will see the similarities because you have defined a specific list of anchors (fonts, shades, shapes, graphics etc) that can all be transferred from one marketing item to another without looking out of place.
And that’s all you have to do. Ideally, you could also write down some basic guidelines about how your logo should be presented – e.g. it’s location on the page, the colour/s or shades that are ok to appear behind the logo and how much space should surround the logo.
If you keep to this method, each piece of marketing material you produce will look like it’s part of the same family.
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