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How many is too many?

24th Oct 2010
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When I was with a Big 4 firm we used to laugh at the notion that sole practitioners and partners in small firms might have over 300 clients each - what, so many that you couldn't see the whole client list in a year if you saw one a day?

So I'm sat looking at my weekly work in progress report and wondering just how many clients I oversee these days - and was staggered to see that I have 890 clients with work in progress at the moment, of which 530 are not allocated to a manager - i.e. in theory they are down to me to bill and look after.

OK, that's not exactly true as we list company directors and partners separately, so there's quite a bit of duplication, and I have delegated out quite a few more jobs this year. Still, even if I only need to focus on half of the 530 that's still more than one a day!

I am guessing that there are around 1,000 active clients in my office, so if they were divided more evenly between five portfolio holders that's an average of 200 cases each, which is still quite a tall order, made worse because all the personal tax cases need to be wrapped up by 31 January each year and most of the companies have 31 March year ends, so work is inevitable bunched at certain times of year. Personally, I am actively trying to categorise my clients as A,B or Cs, and to make sure that the top A clients get the level of personal service and proactivity that they expect, which means making sure that I speak to all of them at least once a month. Looking at that list that means more than one a day just from the A list!

Are we unusual? What is a good number of clients? Or to put it another way, how many is too many? Thoughts and comments below please, as usual.

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By dbowleracca
29th Oct 2010 20:35

I would say well done!
I think 1000 clients in total is a pretty good number, and well done for getting and keeping them all!

I don't know exactly how many we have but I would say it is around the 800 mark, so we aren't too far behind. Hopefully, with the strategies we have in place, we will be at 1,000 by 2014 but the extra 200 should be good A clients if our marketing pays off.

I'm not sure what the ideal number is, probably the more the better, so long as they pay a decent fee and respect what you do and are good businesses to work with.

For an individual relationship manager, I think 20 to 30 clients with fees of around 7,000 each is perfect. You can get to know them well, provide them with te support they deserve, and make a nice profit from it too. In this case I would imagine that for every relationship manager you would have two support staff helping prepare accounts etc, leaving the relationship manager to meet with then and deal with the higher level service that they need. 45k for them, 25k each for the support staff on average, and you make around 100k for the practice before overheads, nice work!

If only it were so simple to get to that position!

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