Tax professionals undersell themselves at review time

You spent the year doing work nobody outside the department can see, and now you have three boxes to fill in. Most people fill them in badly, and it costs them.

The specific problem in tax

Tax work is invisible when it goes well. Nobody notices the return that was filed correctly or the audit that quietly closed. So when review season arrives, tax professionals write self-assessments that describe duties, “managed the quarterly provision,” “oversaw state compliance”, which read to a compensation committee as a job description rather than a case.

Meanwhile the person in FP&A who moved one metric has a number in their review. You almost certainly have several. You just have not written them down.

What we do in the hour

• Find your numbers. Credits identified, rate impact, penalties avoided, hours removed from a process, a settlement below reserve. Almost everyone has three or four and has never counted them.
• Rewrite the self-assessment. From duties to contribution. This alone changes how the conversation opens.
• Make the ask. Promotion, title, compensation, scope, what to ask for, when in the cycle to ask, and the words to use.
• Handle a review that went badly. If you got feedback you did not expect, what to do in the next ninety days.
• Read the signal. Sometimes a review tells you the ceiling is where you are standing. We will tell you honestly what we think it means.

Timing matters

Book before you write the self-assessment, not after. Once it is submitted, most of the leverage is gone. If your cycle runs on a calendar year, that means October or November.

Common questions

What if I do not have quantifiable wins?

You do. This is the most common thing people say to us, and in a combined 30+ years we have not met a tax professional with nothing to count. Finding them is a good part of what the hour is for.

Should I ask for a raise or a promotion?

They are different conversations with different timing, and asking for both at once usually gets you neither. We work out which one is actually available to you this cycle.

My review already happened and it went badly. Too late?

No. That is a different and more useful session. The ninety days after a bad review matter more than the review.

Will you tell me if I should just leave?

If that is what we think, yes. We have spent a combined 30+ years watching where these careers go. Sometimes the honest answer is that the growth is somewhere else, and you are better off hearing it.

Other coaching services

• College Graduate Career Counseling$175
• LinkedIn 101$225
• Resume Advice$250
• Interview Coaching$350
• Navigating Your Job Search$350
• Public Accounting to Industry$350
• Executive Presentations$475
• Boardroom Presentations$550

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