Accountants Obsessed with Themselves

With the explosion of social media over the last decade, accountants (like a large percentage of the population), have become obsessed with themselves. A quick look at a typical accountant’s website, shows it is all about the accountant. How wonderful they are, how smart, how they have certain qualifications, their often boring and lack lustre achievements etc. Usually a lot of very big claims and sweeping statements and content that means nothing to the client at all.

In contrast, the poor client, or prospective client, never gets a mention or a thought. Too many accountants are putting their time, effort and money into talking about themselves, when they instead should be focusing on the client’s needs. That is, how they can help the client make more money, increase their business value, increase their net worth, and reduce their tax expense.

As Paul Graham the founder of ViaWeb and Y Combinator (a seed stage investment firm) said ‘the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse’.