Dick Ingwersen refocused GH&I on growth during the recession

Rein in the spending. You have to look around and see where are you spending money that you don’t need to be, that’s just kind of a luxury or maybe even a little bit wasteful.

You look at your P&L and you see where the categories are and you think about it.

We had some extra services we provided — all of that is part of, you expand, you want to provide as many services as you can, but some are more profitable than others, so you weed out. We had a recruiting section, and we had to put that aside. While it was great for our clients occasionally, it wasn’t supporting itself on its own. … They were nice to have, but they weren’t our core stuff, and it wasn’t making money, so we had to cut back in those areas, which was part of our selective downsizing.

You look at where the big expenditures are and those things that aren’t core, and that’s where you cut back, and you advise your clients to do the same thing. Just go through it and say, ‘We’re spending this much money, and how much benefit are we getting out of this?’ If the top line isn’t moving, you don’t want that whole thing to take out your bottom line. You have to try to generate as much revenue as you can [by removing] some of the fat that got in there when things were going well and you were growing, but they weren’t necessary, essential-type expenditures that you needed to be making.

Network. It’s renewing contacts that you’ve had. If you haven’t talked to somebody you can think of as a referral source or (called) a friend of the firm in a few years and you think, ‘They’re taking care of me, and they’re going to refer things,’ well the facts of life are, they aren’t thinking about you at that point in time. [Call them and say,] ‘Hey, we haven’t spent any time together in a while, let’s go have breakfast.’ Then all of a sudden you’re back in their mind, and I don’t know how many times after I’ve made a reconnection like that that they’ve called me after and said, ‘Hey, I have this person I want you to talk to.’ They knew me, but they weren’t thinking about me until I reconnected with them. The people know you; they’re not thinking about you unless you do it on a current basis.

There are new connections too. There are people out there. The hard thing that happens in our profession is that you have to discipline yourself, because you are so busy doing all of your stuff and working with the current people and staying close with them, which is important, but you have to carve out some time to do that.

It’s important to keep the business coming in, because you’re going to lose business. We lose really good clients that get bought out by usually bigger, maybe public, companies. We helped them grow … so when you think about that, you could be doing a great job, but then the business is gone through no fault of your own. If I want to keep 10 [customers] and five are gone, the new side has to be 15 to keep me 10. That’s a constant thing — it’s reconnecting and spending some time.

How to reach: Gifford Hillegass & Ingwersen LLP, (770) 396-1100 or www.ghi-cpa.com