As a tax professional, you know you’re required to take continuing education classes. License renewal requirements vary by state and all of them call for a certain number of technical study hours. The problem is, while those technical study hours may help you keep up to date on tax-related issues, very few (if any), actually help you make more money.
I’m going to take a leap here and assume you didn’t start your tax practice simply because you love numbers and you think the IRS is all that. I’m going to assume you started your tax practice because you wanted to make money and that really, you’d like to make more money this year than you did last year. And that in 5, 10 or 15+ years, you’d like to see your profits double, triple or even quadruple. Am I right? Let’s talk about how to make that happen with continuing education.
Regardless of which state you call home, you’re probably allowed to apply a certain number of non-technical hours to your continuing education requirements. As far as I’m concerned, you’ll set yourself up for massive growth if you dedicate all of those hours to courses that will help you contribute to your bottom line. Don’t think there are any? Well, think again.
Today we spoke with Jennifer Bridges, PMP and Founder of PDUs2Go.com, Inc. Her company is dedicated to making everything about learning and earning PDUs better than ever. Loaded with a robust library of more than 500 PDUs, she’s got a little something for every type of professional that needs to fulfill continuing education requirements. While we’re not able to endorse any specific courses or companies that offer continuing education courses, as CPA’s ourselves, we’ll simply say this: we think Jennifer is up to something fabulous and that she’s offering some courses that are definitely worth your consideration. That’s why we asked her to provide professional recommendations for courses that would help you, our beloved tax professionals, make more money. Here are her top three choices:
Optimize Your Thinking: How to Unlock Your Performance Potential
In this course, through revealing self-assessments, you’ll examine your effectiveness as a thinker, team member, and leader while learning to adjust your approach for each personality and situation you encounter.
As a tax professional, you work with a lot of different personalities. And if you approach everyone in the same way, you’re likely to encounter far more problems than you ever anticipated. When you’re armed with a keen understanding of the way you and those around you think and process information, you can better achieve your goals, influence others, and lead your staff and your clients to victory. And of course you know what that means, right? Some people say “happy wife, happy life.” We say “happy staff, happy graph,” (income growth graph, that is).
Co-Create: How Your Business Will Profit From Innovative and Strategic Collaboration
How do you think having a systematic methodology to get others to invest their time and effort into your success would impact your bottom line? That’s what this course teaches you to do. Based on the best-selling book Co-Create by David Nour, this on-demand course is about creating market gravity that pulls others toward your efforts.
Tired of being a marketing department of one? As a Co-Creator, you’ll create a professional brand influence that leads other to engage in actions and attitudes that lift your impact.
Imagine, attorneys, financial advisors, executive business coaches and so many more professionals referring new business leads to you in droves. Interested? You need this course.
Relationship Currency: How to Build Lasting Business Relationships
When it comes to business, your relationship-building/nurturing skills matter. A lot. In fact, your success story has very little to do with your education, technical skills or business acumen. When the day is done, it all comes down to relationships and your ability to create them upfront and nurture them over time.
This course digs into something called Relationship Currency®—what allows you to identify, build, nurture and quantify lasting business relationships, both within and outside of your organization. Our favorite part? It teaches you a 30-60-90 day Strategic Relationship Plan™ toward execution, performance and results of any project.
Think about this: If you built beautiful relationships with your clients that led to acquiring just one referral from each of them, you’d double your business. Motivated, anyone?!
The opportunities to create new revenue while satisfying continuing education requirements are truly endless. Jennifer offers many more classes you may want to take a peek at.
Who do you know that’s teaching profit-centric continuing education courses for CPA’s that the rest of the world needs to know about? We’d love to hear your suggestions. Please pop them in the comments below.
