By Robert Wenzel
Reader John Higgins emails:
Why don't you create a small course on interviewing and finding an accountant? I'm interested in getting a small business up and running and want to keep my taxes as low as possible. But I have no idea what to ask an accountant or what I should be looking for.
Long ago you wrote something about interviewing accountants, but you didn't say what we should be looking for.
There is no need for a video on this. The process I use to hire any professional when I need something important done is very simple.
I recognize that the skill level of professionals in every category is probably shaped something like a normal bell curve. Way to the left there are a real bunch of idiots. In the middle are a lot of dull components and on the right side of the bell curve are truly spectacular creative people.
To find the spectacular, what I do is
explain my situation, as best I understand it, to at least 10 professionals in the sector and listen to their answers to determine how knowledgeable they are and how much more skilled they are than their colleagues. The truly spectacular will immediately stand out from the rest. If after interviewing 10, it still doesn't result in finding a standout, and it is important to me that I do, I just keep on going. These days most of these interviews can be done over the phone.
In the case of finding a spectacular accountant for a new business. I would go to accountants and ask the following:
I am starting a business in the XYZ fields, how should I set things up for accounting and tax purposes?
And then just listen for the person that has the most knowledge about your industry.
By the way, there is a corollary to this when dealing with customer service agents on the phone. I call it North's Law, since I first heard it described by Gary North.
As we all know, it can be frustrating dealing with customer service personnel over the phone. Many are not just that competent. In fact, I suspect the bell curve for customer service agents as far as competence is concerned has a big lump on the left incompetence side of the curve.
North's advice on handling an incompetent customer service phone agent is to just hang up, and call back until you get one on the line that is competent and can solve your problem.
Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of "Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person" and also The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. The Robert Wenzel podcast is on iphone and stitcher.
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