As the Baby Boomer generation ages, a growing number of them face decisions around long-term care needs for themselves or their parents. This presents an opportunity for CPAs to have important family wealth-planning conversations. By proactively discussing potential home caregiver requirements, you can position your firm as a trusted advisor while identifying clients who may need support transferring assets or updating estate plans.

May was an extremely busy month for labor rules across the U.S. Read on for our latest roundup of the Department of Labor's final rule, its ramifications across industries, and expert opinions on how all these topics impact your practice and your clients.

DOL Finalizes Fiduciary Investment Advice Regulation | Practical Law The Journal | Reuters
Reuters
The Department of Labor (DOL) has finalized a regulation on the definition of fiduciary investment advice under the Employee Retirement Income ... 

After hiring a nanny or senior caregiver, families often turn to Certified Public Accountants or other tax preparers with questions about what to do next. “How do I handle payroll,” and “Do I have to pay taxes,” are common questions.

As mentioned in Family Office Hot Topics, technology is becoming a huge part of the family office day-to-day routine. Reporting systems can give families and advisors access to real time data anywhere in the world and security concerns associated with cloud services are all but gone. Modernizing how your office does business is especially important as second and third generations start their own families; everyone knows how we millennials like our screens and instant gratification! Donny Shimamoto (Intraprise Technologies) gave us a good overview of how to integrate new technologies into the family office.

Randy Abeles (RSM) and Eric Johnson (Deloitte) teamed up to talk about current issues faced in family offices. Both of them work closely with family offices and deal with these topics on a regular basis. Like most of the other sessions I attended, this one focused heavily on advising family offices to treat themselves like a regular service providing business.

Jason Deshayes (AICPA) delivered a session that was applicable to any business really, not just CPAs. Client service is a prime differentiator especially in smaller local firms. If you’re doing this wrong, you won’t be “doing” very long. Luckily Jason laid out some solid advice to make this easy for you. The session had three main focus points; finding fee increasing opportunities, going from service provider to trusted advisor, and best practices to act on now.

Tuesday morning at Engage 2017 kicked off with a business titan sharing advice to an arena full of people. Kevin O’Leary (Mr. Wonderful on Shark Tank) took the stage and shared with us lessons from his business and personal life. His advice revolved around creating and building successful businesses, something he clearly knows a lot about. This ended up being a theme for the week, focusing on your firm as a business and how to grow it into the future.

“Let’s meet about that” is a popular refrain that echoes regularly through the offices and hallways of organizations everywhere. Often though, said meetings are hastily arranged and largely unproductive. Although emergency “huddles” are sometimes called for, good meetings are well planned. Here are some important points to keep in mind.