Starting your own practice - clients and services | Sage | picture of Caroline Armstrong - Infinitas Accountants

Starting your own practice: Clients, services and your team

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You’ve built your foundations: you’ve set out your plans for your new practice, defined your targets and your measures of success, and you know for certain that starting up your own practice is the right move for you. 

11th Aug 2022
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The first article in our “Starting your own practice” series covered planning and first steps. Now it’s time to get into the practical detail of starting and running your firm. That means finding your first clients, setting out your services, and, crucially, getting the right people to carry out the work.

In this second part of our series on starting your own accounting practice, we dig into the following topics:

How to find clients for your accounting firm

The traditional method: referrals

Most new practice owners start with clients from their own networks. These might be your friends and family, people you’ve worked for in previous employment, or acquaintances from business events. 

Those people might go on to recommend you to their own friends and acquaintances, so you might see your client base grow organically. 

Although traditional, word of mouth is still a powerful tool, particularly if you work in a niche sector, or with small businesses and startups. It comes down to the simple fact that people trust professionals that someone they trust is willing to vouch for. 

If lots of your business comes from referrals, it’s worth considering proactively incentivising your clients to recommend you. Things like loyalty schemes, or small discounts for successfully introducing you to someone that goes on to become a client, can really encourage people to get talking about how you’ve helped them. 

The targeted method: digital marketing

Accountants have typically relied on referrals to grow their business this way, and it can work – but it’s not the most reliable way of gaining clients, or the easiest to control. 

If you want to achieve a specific client growth target, or attract more of a certain kind of client, it’s better to go in with a well-considered marketing strategy. 

The first step for this is to know who you’re targeting, and why. With this in mind, you can work out the right marketing strategy to engage your target audience. 

A good place to start is your website. This will be the cornerstone of any digital marketing activity you undertake, so it’s essential that you get it right. Your website should show any visitors who you are, what you do and what you’re about, making it easy for them to find all the information they need and contact you. 

It’s also important to consider social media as part of your marketing plans. Choose your channels wisely, though – one of the main pitfalls accountants run into is overcommitting to different social media platforms and failing to keep up a consistent presence. Based on your knowledge of your target clients, pick out the channels you’re most likely to find them on. 

Last but not least, make sure you consider search engine optimisation (SEO). This is a broad and complex discipline, so you’ll need to do your research or get an expert on board to help, but a simple way to start is by setting up your Google My Business profile, to help people find you more easily when searching.

An alternative: purchasing a client book or practice

An alternative approach to gaining clients is to purchase an existing client book – also known as a “block of fees” – or buy out an entire practice.

This takes a lot of tasks off your plate as you don’t have to go through the initial setup, and it can help alleviate the worry of starting from scratch. But both of these options come with a significant upfront cost, so you’ll need to think about how you’ll finance the purchase, and how this fits into your overall business plan.

It’s also a major commitment and a large increase in workload. How will your firm handle it?

Accounting services: niche or generalist, compliance or advisory?

The influence of new technology has seen two key trends emerge in the accountancy industry in recent years – a focus on niche markets, and on added-value advisory services.

A few decades ago, if you wanted to find an accountant, you might pick a large, well-known firm, or you might go for your local high-street practice. Nowadays, prospective clients only have to type a quick search into Google to see thousands of accounting firms, both in their local area and nationally.

With so much competition, accountants need to be smarter about the way they position themselves. They need a well-defined, unique selling point that gives people a great reason to work with them.

A niche can help you do this, making your firm more focused, efficient and profitable, and helping you to stand out from the competition. “For us, niching in the construction sector has been amazing – if you can really narrow down who your ideal client is, you can create content that speaks to them,” said Carly Shaw of Clarative Accounting. 

The other major trend in the industry is a shift towards advisory services.

As accounting software becomes more advanced, it’s possible to automate more of the compliance-focused tax services that accountants would traditionally carry out. In response, many firms are putting more focus on human expertise and advice, using software to enhance this service, rather than replace it.

It’s a good idea to think about the balance between compliance and advisory your firm will offer, with the future in mind – and to consider how you’ll go about packaging up and providing an advice service.

“Advisory is a natural part of our service delivery – we see this as an important part of managing our clients’ expectations and our referral network is very strong as a result of this,” said Caroline Armstrong of Infinitas Accountants.

Building an effective team

Even if you start your firm alone, there’ll most likely come a point when you need some assistance. When accessing some support to get the work done, you have a few options:

  • Hiring staff allows you to build your own team, instilling your own firm’s values and culture and getting full oversight on the quality of work they produce. This can be hugely rewarding, but it also comes with high levels of investment in both time and money.
  • Outsourcing is a lower-commitment option that can be cost-effective in some cases, but lacks the control you have when managing your own employees. 
  • Partnering with external experts or other practices is also a common option, allowing you to access specialist services or day-to-day support. 

Ultimately, if you have growth in mind, you’ll need to build your practice for scalability. That means getting used to the idea of delegating work, through one of the methods above, or a combination of them throughout your practice’s lifetime. 

It also means getting the right processes and systems in place, with the help of well-chosen technology. You can read more about this in our third and final instalment in this series: preparing for the future.

You can also access all this information and more, plus eight fascinating case studies from inspirational accountants who’ve started their own practice in our white paper – How to start your own practice.

 

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