Summer vacations apart, accountants are fervently using the time to grow their practices. Pransform exhibited at 5 accounting and technology trade shows in the last 4 months and spoke with hundreds of CPAs, Accountants and Tax Preparers. Our most favorite question that we asked each accountant was:
What are you doing differently this year to bring in more clients?
Notice the word “differently”. Here are the Top 5 stealth growth strategies (you’ll love the 5th one) accountants are using right now to grow their practice…
Why Are We Calling These As “Stealth” Strategies?
Because not many people at these firms or the clients of these firms know about these actions till things actually happened. It’s almost impossible for competitors to know about it.
1. Buying:
We were told by so many CPAs that they are buying someone else’s practice that we feel it is one of the most common strategies now. And these “buyers” are NOT mid sized or larger firms. Many “Solo Practitioners” are buying others out. The “demographic shift” could be one reason that many more older CPAs are retiring in current times, which could be leading emergence of this strategy as an attractive choice for even smaller accounting firms.
2. Embracing Shared Economy:
AICPA PCPS Survey about issues faced by Accounting firms revealed that “staffing” i.e. getting and retaining talented staff is one of the Top 5 issues for firms of all sizes. Recent surveys also reveal that the “compensations” for talented staff are on historic highs. How are the smaller firms adjusting to this new reality? They are embracing the “1099 Economy” or the Shared Economy wave. They are aggressively using outsourcing as a strategy to overcome staff turnover and staffing shortage challenge; and also “engaging” more “regular temps” to manage growth in business volume. This is also a definite shift towards accountants valuing their own time more carefully and achieving a better work-life balance.
3. Head Over Hands:
It is NOT uncommon to hear from accountants that they are “fully” in the cloud. With a huge jump in third party softwares that “neatly integrate” with accounting and tax “platforms”, automation of data processing is on the upswing. Bank feeds getting automatically imported into accounting software is more and more making inroads into standard processes at accounting firms. With that, the shift towards “selling interpretations and insights” is visible. Accountants are more and more intent in using the head than hands to reduce longer working hours yet boost their income.
4. Special Focus on Being a Specialist:
There are riches in the niches. Everyone seems to know this but there was always that fear that if we don’t sell “everything” to “anyone and everyone”, we’ll lose that business. No more. While the standard list of services is as before, you can easily find that many CPA firm websites are now displaying “industries” as the key navigation link. This is because of two key reasons: one – accountants are indeed becoming specialists in certain chosen industries so that they can offer deeper insights to their clients (at premium fee rates, of course) and two – the geographical boundaries are being aggressively destroyed by cloud technologies.
5. Getting New Clients to Chase Accountants (not the other way around):
We are hearing this from more accountants than ever before that they are investing in technologies that help them get found by the prospects online. It is a strategy named “Inbound”, implemented by almost all rapidly growing firms. And the costs of inbound technology implementations have come down significantly as more and more “trained” professionals have made that as their business. (We ourselves know this because we tried this for over 3 years, failed with 5 different providers and then saw better results with the latest ones we work with. If you like, we can send you more information. Just contact us. We also figured out that there are several “free” utilities out there that can integrate with your website to “generate leads”). “Content marketing” to create a thought leadership position is a huge factor in the inbound success. Being a “niche” player also helps you become a thought leader.
Pransform helps accounting and tax professionals grow their practice faster, reliably and profitably. Our accounting outsourcing, bookkeeping outsourcing, tax preparation outsourcing services are creating new revenue and profit for our clients. Here are some of the powerful outcomes we deliver to accounting and tax firms and professionals. Contact us now to know how we can help you.
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