How to Expand a Small Accountancy Firm
If you’re a small accountancy firm wanting to grow, you may be looking at how you can expand to gain more clients and increase the size of your firm. In this article, we’ll take a look at strategies designed to grow your brand and accountancy firm and help you reach your business goals.
Streamline Your Services
Ensure that you have clear and defined services that you can offer to potential clients. What are most of your clients looking for? It may seem counterintuitive to streamline and niche down your services when you’re trying to expand your business but by specifically identifying who your services will most benefit, you can set yourself apart from your competition and identify who you’re marketing to.
Streamlining your services also allows you to clearly match a client’s problem or need to the service you offer that will solve it. If you don’t have this clearly outlined upfront then you will need to tailor your services to each and every new client, which can quickly become unfeasible and unprofitable.
Setting Goals
Make sure to set growth goals for your business and frequently review your goals and how close you are to achieving them. This serves as a great motivator and reminds you where you’re going and why you want to get there. Make sure your goals are SMART goals so you can clearly identify if and when they’ve been achieved.
You should also set individual goals for your employees to keep them engaged and ensure that their knowledge and skills aren’t being under-utilized, which could slow down growth and leave your employees feeling stagnant.
Marketing and Brand Awareness
Often in the accounting industry, the most trusted and well-known firms will get most of the work. So how do you become trusted and well-known? Marketing! Get your business out there through a variety of methods, whether it’s content marketing, social media marketing, or in-person networking. You could produce a leaflet using a design template which can then be handed out at industry events, conferences, and networking events.
Client Retention and Repeat Purchase
Your main focus as an accounting firm should be retaining your existing clients by satisfying them with the work you are already doing. Consistently providing excellent results and practicing good communication is key to retaining clients, which will in turn grow your business as new clients come on board and decide to retain your services.
Expanding Workforce
As your accountancy firm expands, you will need to recruit and hire new employees to meet the growing needs of your business.
When it’s time to start hiring new employees, put aside job titles and instead, think strategically about your team as a whole. Knowing what your existing strengths and weaknesses are as a firm will allow you to identify the skills you’re missing so you’re better able to find someone who will augment what you can already offer.
Ongoing training and support packages will ensure new employees settle into the team and can also help them deliver the best possible service to your clients, which will help your accountancy firm attract and retain clients.
