Knowledge or Service Workers

In today’s world, accountants and consultants are among the ultimate knowledge workers, generating wealth for their customers from the ideas they create.

Accountants and consultants likely entered the profession to help people, so how did we end up focusing on billing for time spent and not focusing on creating and providing value to our customers?

Simply put: customers buy results and solutions to problems – they don’t buy time. Time may be simple to measure in a professional accounting and consulting company, but why bother? It doesn’t relate to what our customers really want. Are we still stuck with the basic notion that the way to create wealth for accounting and consulting firms is to leverage people and hours?

The question should be “How do we capture and bill for the value that we create using our knowledge for our customers?” The service time becomes irrelevant if we don't create value for the customer, and there should be no billing. With a knowledge worker focused on value, both the customer and the knowledge worker win. The accounting and consulting business is not a zero-sum game where one side wins and the other loses.

Let’s use our knowledge to create wealth for our customers and prosper together.