What is the #1 thing on your website that will convince a prospect that your firm is the right choice for a project? Rod Burkert shares his views on what is needed to go from zero to hero and land that engagement. Imagine I am a prospect for getting your BVFLS services. I found you on Google or LinkedIn. Or maybe I saw an article you wrote. Maybe heard a presentation you gave. Or maybe I got a recommendatio ...

An Additional Consideration for Business Valuation and Forensic Accountants When Valuing a Company The Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), 740 Ill. Comp. Stat. 14/1 et seq., is not just for Google and Facebook. While the technology giants have been sued for allegedly violating BIPA, so too have countless other companies. In the last few years, plaintiffs have sued hundreds, if not thousands, of compan ...

Technology (Part V of V) As noted in the first installment of this five-part series, an ambulatory surgery center (ASC) is a distinct entity that primarily provides outpatient surgical procedures to patients who do not require an overnight stay after the procedure. ASCs typically provide relatively uncomplicated surgical procedures in a non-hospital, outpatient setting, and most ASC cases are non-emergency, ...

Establish Yourself as a Sought-after Speaker Public speaking offers a range of opportunities—from professional growth, to promotion of you and your business, to breathing new life into your existing network. In addition, by doing a little preparation and research, you will find many excellent opportunities within your reach. In this article, the author helps the reader learn how to find the perfect audience ...

The congratulatory texts and tweets started the last week of November. Microsoft had overtaken Apple to become the world’s most valuable company, a stunning climax in a year that also saw it pass Amazon and Google’s Alphabet Inc. Longtime employees, who’d grown accustomed to thinking of Microsoft as far removed from its glory years, when it was run by Bill Gates and feared as the “Evil Empire,” were flooded ...

As Apple and Amazon compete for a greater share of consumer dollars and attention, they also have a particularly intimate business relationship: Apple is spending more than $30 million a month on Amazon’s cloud, according to people familiar with the arrangement. To read the full article in CNBC, click: Apple Spends More Than $30 Million on Amazon's Cloud Every Month, Making it One of the Biggest AWS Custome ...

Beyond Keyword Placement—An Illustration for Search Engines to Find You In previous QuickRead articles, the author discussed the role blogging can play when marketing a firm’s services. When relevant articles are written and posted on a website, those articles can be found by prospects who are looking to solve a business challenge. But to ensure that blog posts are discovered, one needs to optimize them by ...

Step-by-Step With increasing competition in the accounting field, you want to ensure that clients and prospects can easily find your content through search engines like Google. You can do so by optimizing the copy (i.e., marketing text) on certain pages of your website. This article describes the process of web text optimization. With increasing competition in the accounting field, you want to ensure that c ...

Days after Apple announced a major expansion to its operations in the U.S.—including a new $1 billion campus in Austin—fellow tech giant Google has announced that it too will invest $1 billion as it sets up a new campus at Hudson Square in New York. To read the full article in Tech Crunch, click: Google is Spending $1 Billion to Build a Massive New Campus in New York. ...

Alexa Voice AI Makes Conversational Valuation Possible What if your valuation reports could have a two-way conversation with your clients? How would that improve the usability of your work product? Could it increase the value of your firm’s intellectual capital? In this, the author discusses how Alexa Voice AI can deliver a calculation report to a client. ...

It seems like it was just last year when we mused if non-GAAP earnings measurements were becoming a permanent fixture of the market.  How quickly the times change.  Samantha Albert, senior financial analyst with Mercer Capital, explains. To read the full article in Mercer Capital's Financial Reporting Blog, click: Compensating for Something: Facebook’s GAAP Change. This article is republished from Mercer Ca ...

Google Chrome is the world's most popular web browser.  Are you using its features as effectively as possible?  J. Carlton Collins, CGMA Magazine contributing editor, provides a useful quiz to test your navigation skills in Chrome. To read the full article in CGMA, click: Quiz: How Well Do You Know Google Chrome? ...

Incentive compensation works much like the proverbial carrot dangled in front of a horse.  The lure of a future reward to employees encourages and propels momentum at the company level.  But what happens when the carrot is dangled a little too closely?  Megan Richards, financial analyst with Mercer Capital, explores this topic. To read the full article in Mercer Capital's Financial Reporting Blog, click: Ca ...

What to Ask and Look for When You Need a Forensic Expert In today’s legal environment, it is not sufficient to present unsubstantiated evidence. Many subject matter experts do not properly substantiate their findings. When hiring a subject matter expert, careful screening is crucial to choose an expert with superior skills and credibility. This article presents methodologies by which you can perform proper ...

The presence of an unrecognized device attempting to access your Google account could be a serious threat.  J. Carlton Collins, JofA contributing editor, recommends you remove the unknown device and change your password immediately. To read the full article in the Journal of Accountancy, click: Cybersecurity: Unknown Google Device. ...

And What You Can Do About It How are prospects discovering professional service organizations? While referrals are important, the evidence suggests that more and more prospects are using other channels to retain professional services. ...

Not all Social Networks Are Created Equal Has your firm embraced social media? Be ready! The days of ignoring social media are long gone. Professional services firms looking to accelerate their growth need to embrace social media and dedicate the resources needed to create a strategy, implement it, and track it. In this article, the author presents research on the impact and value of social media to profess ...

Are you looking for new ways to evolve your own financial planning business?  Michael Kitces, Partner and Director of Research for Pinnacle Advisory Group, discusses the innovative and inspiring ideas found in Chris Anderson’s book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”. To find out more on the Nerd’s Eye View article, click: Freemium Pricing Models For Financial Advisors | Kitces.com. ...

For those of us who spent much of our careers in the old professional services marketplace, it’s all too easy to think of our firm websites as an afterthought–something you have to have in today’s world, but not a priority. A growing body of research demonstrates, however, that this couldn’t be further from the truth. This article looks at recent research on the matter and suggests that a website may well b ...

  In a recent valuation, Apple has been crowned the most valuable company on the planet, and second place wasn’t even close. After its stock hit a record high recently, Apple was valued at $700 billion. That’s $300 billion more than the runner-up, Exxon Mobile. It’s hard to wrap your head around these kinds of numbers, but imagine the enormity that is Google. Even with that kind of influence, Google is ...