Mr Turner had a variety of accounting roles before starting his own firm in early 2020.

“In the process of building my own firm, I realised a lot of the challenges I was working through in building my firm, lawyers were experiencing it in their firm,” he said.

“So, I started talking to more lawyers and realised, hey, I know the answer to that question. And that’s where my passion for helping law firms started to develop, because I saw so many similarities between their business and the business that I was building.”

One of the biggest services TLTuner Group provides is bookkeeping, which is something Mr Turner said a number of organisations struggle with.

“They don’t understand their numbers because they’re not even seeing their numbers. So the bookkeeping helps them solve that, by really helping sort out all the money that they’re spending in their bank account they’re getting through their law firm management when people are making payments and stuff,” he added.

“So, we sort out all of that to make sure that they can get regular financial statements and information, then what we also provide are CFO services where we’re helping them. Now that we have your financials, hey, now we’re analysing how you run your business. We’re looking at how you manage your cases, and we’re making recommendations. And we really help them figure out that strategy for getting and remaining profitable.”

In terms of helping firms become more predictable with their finances, Mr Turner said that smaller firms, in particular, tend to struggle.

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“Most people say that this doesn’t happen in big law. And it’s not because, hey, the lawyers at big law are so much smarter about finance. It’s just, BigLaw day-to-day firms have the money to hire people to focus on finance. And so, a lot of your smaller law firms struggle in this area because, based on their knowledge or their perspective, they can’t afford to hire somebody full-time to come in and do this,” he explained.  

“Plus, they also have to actually deliver on the client work. They have to actually run the cases. They have to manage the clients. And if they have paralegals or staff, they’ve got to manage the staff. And then on maybe that half an hour of a day that they have left, then they’ve got to figure out finance. And most of them just don’t do it.”

Some of these issues lie in smaller firms hiring an accountant – but only speaking to them once a year, once their tax needs to be done.

“I think the way that accountants approach serving their clients oftentimes is they only expect to have a conversation once or twice a year. The rest of the time, they’re almost avoiding their clients. When one of the things that I help law firms understand is the financial information and the level of clarity you start to get on your finances around tax time; how much more helpful would that be if you got that all year long?” Mr Turner said.

“I think the first problem that they usually have is they don’t talk to their accountant enough. And I think part of that is because the accountant has never really set the stage to let them know, ‘Hey, we can have more frequent conversations. And not only that, we should have more frequent conversations.’

“And I think that a lot of attorneys, as they start to really think about it, and they’re like, ‘You know what? It does make sense for us to have more regular communication.’ Because that will help solve a lot of financial hurdles that get found out when tax season is coming.”

Therefore, your accountant should be proactive in having conversations throughout the year to discuss issues like how much cash is in the business, or when a smaller firm can afford to hire someone else to help with the workload.

“The way I look at it is you’re paying me to help you, not you’re paying me so you can chase me. And I view it as it’s on the accountant to really be proactive about that, which is why a while ago I created a video on social media where I talked about, most businesses, you probably should fire your accountant, because in what other scenario would you see paying big money to someone who’s running away from you probably 10 out of 12 months out of the year? They just avoid you,” Mr Turner added.

“And then when you finally do talk to them during tax time, they talk over your head trying to tell you things that you don’t understand. And that dynamic of that relationship should change to where the accountant should be there to actually help you move your business forward. If they’re doing their job right, they know information and they know how frequently you need the information. And the question really comes down to, does your accountant care about your business enough to be proactive?”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Terrell Turner, click below: 

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