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Discover the secrets of Practice Excellence
Sobell Rhodes_Practice Excellence Awards
Practice Excellence Award winner Sobell Rhodes

Discover the secrets of Practice Excellence

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8th May 2017
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With the 2017 Practice Excellence Awards in full swing, AccountingWEB’s John Stokdyk looks into the trends and directions that emerged from entrants in the previous four years.

As the Practice Excellence Awards evolved, we discovered that the entries gave a unique insight into what leading firms were doing to boost client satisfaction, and which direction the profession as a whole is heading.

Thanks to the generosity of our Practice Excellence Award winners, we share a lot of these techniques in case study articles and topical guides on AccountingWEB.

When talking to accountants about our findings, as I will be doing at Accountex this week, I refer to these findings as a “trend radar” that helps to guide our future coverage.

Cloud adoption 2013-16

For example, during the past four years cloud accounting has moved from a minority interest among cutting edge firms to a mainstream activity, with nearly six out of 10 (58%) entrants in 2016 using one of the major online accounting engines:

Cloud adoption 2013-16

In the competition for clients, however, that means cloud capabilities will not be so effective at helping firms to stand out from the crowd, so practitioners need to look at new avenues for growth opportunities.

Top five Practice Excellence initiatives 2013-16

Top five Practice Excellence initiatives 2013-16

The picture that emerges from the top five initiatives reported by entrants in last year’s awards (see above) is that developing new market niches holds the key to growth. All of the practices that competed for our New Firm of the Year award last year identitifed themselves as niche players, and many established firms explained how they were growing by offering specialist services to specific sectors within their client base.

The “top 5” chart also highlights the extent to which Practice Excellence firms are committing time and resources to marketing. Client referrals surged significantly in 2016, and went hand in hand with the niche trend, where personal recommendation plays a big role for specialist practitioners.

Back in 2014, it appeared that firms focused on either face-to-face referrals and events, or on digital marketing practices - but in the years since, it is much more common for practices to do both.

One of the clearest issues to emerge from the top line figures is that much of the effort being expended on client referral efforts, content marketing and social media may be going to waste because even among the profession’s leading firms, few are measuring the results they achieve. Just 29% of the entrants gave us solid figures on the results they achieved from their referral and social efforts, or indicated that they used some kind of customer relationship management system.

Which brings us to Making Tax Digital. HMRC’s stuttering digitisation programme poses all sorts of challenges to forward-looking practices as well as those who would prefer it just went away.

On the assumption that the election campaign is just a brief hiatus and that the programme will be back as insistently as ever by July. Many of the most pressing issues MTD raises have a lot in common with the things that Practice Excellence firms are dealing with. For example, extracting data from clients and managing the slower/lazier ones through deadline processes is all about good communication and tracking, for which CRM and practice management tools could be extremely useful.

There’s a great opportunity to embrace MTD and cater specifically by taxpayers who may struggle to cope with the new regime, but then again they may not be the right clients for a firm looking to focus more on specialist business advice.

Communicating the continuing value of the services you provide and designing the firm around your ideal clients is part of the development process for most entrants to the Practice Excellence Awards. Accountants of all types can learn from their examples by reading about the programme on AccountingWEB, or coming along to my Accountex talk at the Accountants in Practice theatre at 1:00pm on Thursday 11 May to get a more detailed analysis of Practice Excellence trends.

Or if you want to get more actively involved, visit the Practice Excellence website to enter the annual awards and participate in our October conference and online webinar series.

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