Public accounting offers many opportunities for growth, and the proof of this is the rising revenues at most of the firms that submit their numbers in the many surveys. One thing common among those firms is their expanding array of services.
Managing an accounting practice is complicated and involves many functions that need to be carefully calibrated and integrated to achieve success. However, there is one immutable fact, and that is a desire of our clients to engage us for those services. Without that, nothing else matters. Excellence in every other facet of operating the accounting business will not matter. So, how can you grow so that 2025 is your best year ever? You need to offer more services to your current clients and then to new clients.
Growth from existing clients is called organic growth. Growth from new clients is external and arises from marketing activities and client acquisition by purchase or merger. If you want to grow, you need growth from both organic and external sources. How much you want to grow and whether you want to grow has to be strategically determined, but a minimum decision has to be that some growth is needed.
Added sales of new services are more easily obtained from existing clients. There is no selling who you are, your reliability, or your willingness and ability to provide value in everything you do for your clients. Each of these need to be conveyed to new clients before you even get to the pitch of the services you will perform for them.
So go after the easier sales first, i.e., to your existing clients. Here's a way to get started:
- Identify potential needs of your top 20 business clients.
- Arrange those needs into services you presently offer, and
- Services you do not perform.
- Match the potential needs with this group of 20 clients with services you presently offer.
- Contact five of those clients to obtain an engagement for at least one such service.
- Set a goal of initiating a new service for each of those five clients in the new year.
- If you are unsuccessful with your first five targeted clients, then expand the list until you succeed with five added engagements.
- You can try to introduce each of these 20 and even more clients with added services, but I think setting a goal of five added engagements is a good way to start.
- Expand your service offerings by resolving to learn and gain proficiency in at least one new service during the next year.
- Get started by picking a needed service that you do not perform and use that for your personal growth along with your practice's growth.
Overly active practitioners might judge my suggestions to be too placid, while many owners and partners who are content with leaving things as they are will judge me to be excessively aggressive. Either way, I do not see how anyone could lose by selling five large clients the services they need and learning a new one for themselves. I view this as a no-lose growth method.
Check out some ideas of added services described in a
Make 2025 your best year ever by doing something new to make it your best year ever.
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