Success stories:
Total Business Partners

Total Business Partners provide high quality and timely accounting, business and taxation services to a diverse range of clients, with two offices on the Sunshine Coast and in North Lakes.

The firm has a team of 23 highly qualified, experienced and motivated professionals who can provide professional accounting advice to individuals and businesses and is passionate about the benefits of cloud accounting practice management software.

Changing the firm’s positioning

Total Business Partners’ founding Director, Jason Wehlauer explained that the firm had needed to reshape its positioning to attract the right clients:

“We recently changed our brand because we wanted to be seen as partners in business and not strictly just working in accounting. We have taken a lot of joy in going more into advisory work and taking tax returns and financials and giving them meaning for our clients by helping the past to change the future.”

“The more time and experience that we've had with our clients, we've found more and more of their tools are useful and forward thinking. So, we've been trying to implement them as they come along. Some work, some don't.”

How ChangeGPS helped the firm shift direction

With the goal of rebranding or repositioning the firm, Jason took to embedding ChangeGPS within the firm to better communicate advisory concepts to business clients:

“Advisory strategy is not a simple thing to communicate to a business owner. What Change GPS does is puts it in a format that communicates an outcome or helps explain what we're trying to achieve overall.”

“Things like their blueprint has been very useful in explaining to clients’ new structures that we would like to implement and the reasons for those new structures.”

Total Business Partners have implemented TaxPlan as part of their repositioning, to break down new concepts for their clients across a diverse range of industries from construction to NDIS and Allied Health, as Jason elaborates:

“TaxPlan with Change GPS is very extensive and has a great way of communicating in, I guess, simple language to a client why they want to do or should be doing these particular actions before end of financial year.”

“It's great to sit in front of a client and show that we understand the legislation and how they can avoid any conflict with that legislation. A lot of accounting firms out there aren't able to deliver that level of knowledge in a simplistic form that's easily communicated to the client.”

An integral part of operations

Now that ChangeGPS is in place, the team at Total Business Partners have embraced its benefits with open arms:

“In every firm there are different personalities. There are those early adopters that will take it on and run with it.  In the accounting industry, we're a conservative bunch by nature. So, when we use something for the first time, there's a level of doubt. There are all kinds of ifs, buts and maybes as to why we shouldn't be doing something.”

“Our concern is always about making sure a tool is adopted by everybody, not one or two stragglers to say, ‘Oh, I'm not using this.’ When it's adopted by everybody, we can see the benefits of it and we can see that everybody eventually gets it and they go, ‘Oh, this is why we did it like this.’  It's not always evident upfront but within a year or two, it's certainly evident when the mindset shifts to, ‘I'm really glad we did that,’ and we see that in most things that we implement from Change GPS.”

As Total Business Partners have become more advanced in what they’ve implemented, they’ve found ChangeGPS more integral to their firm’s ways of working:

“TaxPlan is integral to our tax planning time each year. We now use the tax report as a guide for when we are completing the work the following year, as to what the outcome should look like. The benefit of this is before the end of financial year, we’re setting our expectation for the client, they know how much tax they’re going to pay or get back.”