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For any accounting firm to grow and remain relevant in today’s society, it needs to adopt some growth strategies and develop practical ways of executing them to yield results.
The major goal of adopting growth strategies mirrors the need to expand and be the best amongst your competitors in the industry. Hence, an ideal accounting firm’s growth strategy should be based on the firm’s goal and target audience.
It highlights methods that your firm can practice to achieve short- and long-term goals, beat the industry’s competition, stay on top of your game, and grow.
Accounting firm growth strategies are peculiar to each firm. However, there are certain accounting firm strategies common to all firms that crave growth.
Below is a list of 6 ultimate growth strategies that will set your accounting firm in motion to achieve the never-experienced, groundbreaking growth record you’d always planned.
Building relationships and interacting with people is a common but great strategy to grow your accounting firm—a must-have asset for every firm looking for growth. It goes a long way in attracting new clients, retaining the loyal ones, and increasing your firm’s visibility.
Networking goes far beyond meeting prospective clients, like most people think. It extends to linking up with experts in different areas of the industry and sustaining relationships with every relevant person that crosses your path, whether prospective clients, regular clients, or experts.
The connections you establish and sustain can earn you expert advice, referrals, and other opportunities that activate growth.
Networking also helps you gather the right client base, and having the right client base gives you the kind of profits that leads to growth and not just the volume of the base.
You can have a large client base, but when you check and balance your input and output, you will discover that you might have been working tirelessly without any real multiplication in your output. The right clients, however, make your every little effort count.
The role that partnerships play in the growth of accounting firms cannot be overemphasized.
From capital sourcing, presenting new opportunities, diversifying services, and gaining credibility and stability in a new market to acquiring new expertise and bridging the service offering gaps, partnership collaboration plays an important role.
A good way to partner is for firms is to look for complementary services. For example, a firm focused on bookkeeping or client accounting services can be a good partner with a firm focused on tax services.
Merging is another good way of collaborating. Whether the merging firms are of the same size or different, it does not stop them from benefiting from each other. Merging comes with its own challenges, such as adjusting to new leadership, working style, and culture.
If a company can tackle these challenges, the new firm is bound to experience growth.
As an accounting firm, one strategy you should never take for granted is investing in expertise. Never fear hiring amazing talents or people skilled in what they do because the more talents your firm has, the higher the output performance of the firm.
Having enough capable hands in your accounting firm will help reduce the workload on your workers and ensure that clients get their services done properly and in due time. It is a strategy that helps retain existing clients.
If the available human resources are not enough because the firm is upscaling, you can hire third-party services such as that of freelancers to cut down on your workload.
Another growth strategy is to create new offers. Creating a new offer is a form of diversification. And diversification fosters growth. Clients want to commit to accounting firms that grow with the trend.
Hence, adding new offers or services to your existing one proves to your client that you are flexible enough to integrate them to their advantage. Besides being a growth strategy, it is a good method to adopt when attracting new clients and spicing things up with your existing clients.
Creating new offers is not limited to just the services you provide. It can also be in terms of how you charge your clients.
Instead of charging your clients per hour, you can charge per project and ensure that your firm offers the value that equals the amount you charge them. It can improve your clients’ impression of your company and earn you referrals that ultimately turn into profits.
Developing new offers for the firm is always a good idea. However, ensure that your firm can afford such services and that the new offers do not conflict with your brand personality to avoid losing face before your clients.
Technology refers to all accounting tools and software that make accounting services accurate, smarter, productive, and efficient. Clients want value for their money.
Hence, they will choose a company that is current with accounting technologies to the one that is not because they believe that the former will be more productive and deliver better accounting services than the latter.
Integrating technology into your services per se may not be enough. But continuous upgrading shows you know what you are doing. And if you invest in technology such as Client Hub that creates an amazing client experience, you set your firm apart from all the other firms that your client can go to.
When you invest in technology, it shows you value your customers and want to offer them the best service. It not only earns you big clients, but also gets them to refer other clients to you.
Projecting your accounting firm and the services you offer to the market is a great strategy to adopt, and marketing is the surest way to make that happen.
If people do not know your firm, what it stands for, and the services you offer, it means you will have little or no client to back your firm up, and you will keep struggling to survive the competition in the market.
Today, online marketing is the trend, and leveraging it can enhance the visibility of your firm. The different online marketing trends include paid adverts on websites and social media, email marketing, content marketing through blogs and websites, among others.
If you are an accounting firm seeking to grow, we have provided you with the important but overlooked growth strategies that will give you momentum to expand, stabilize, grow, and survive the rising competition in the accounting industry.
As you integrate these growth strategies into your accounting firm, a factor you should not neglect is evaluation.
Before and after implementing these strategies, be sure to evaluate your firm. It will help you track the success of these strategies to know which one works best for you: a combination of two more will be a blockbuster.
Are you looking for ways to grow your accounting firm? Sign up to be a member of Client Hub, to start getting tips and expert advice on how to grow and sustain your accounting firm.
You can grow your accounting firm by adopting these important firm growth strategies: networking, partnership, investing in expertise, creating new offers, investing in accounting technologies, and marketing.
A growth strategy in accounting refers to a plan or set of plans developed by accounting firms to help them achieve their expansion goals.
The success of every accounting firm depends on having the right client base, expertise, and diversification. That is one of the reasons why the ultimate accounting firm growth strategies listed above highlights these three features.
The most common way CPA firms get new clients is through networking and referrals. Meeting and building a new relationship with people helps to connect you to prospective clients. Word-of-mouth testimonies also help to project your firm to their market, thereby building trust and attracting loyal clients.
