THE SMALL FIRM AND SOLO PRACTICE

You’re Missing 60% of Your Revenue

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Here are four ways to stop leaving that money on the table.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

Accounting firms have done a great job adopting paperless office technologies, the web and even cloud computing, so you may feel you have been doing all you can to streamline margins, become “client-centric,” as some consultants call it, and grow your practice. But I believe there is even more opportunity that very few, if any, in the accounting profession have fully identified or embraced.

MORE: Calculate Your Business Relationship Ratios | What Can ChatGPT Do for Accounting Professionals? | Generative AI: Should You Avoid It or Adopt It? | Want Better Clients? Here’s How | Get Your Name in the News | Four Ways Small Firms Can Beat Large Ones | Why You Need a Link-In-Bio Tool
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I only bring this up because I believe most CPA firms are leaving about 60 percent of their potential revenue on the table (and I can prove it). Worse, they are not sharing their badly needed financial expertise with more businesses that could be greatly helped, especially now.
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Calculate Your Business Relationship Ratios

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Two women standing, laughing, looking at laptop one is holding, other holds takeout coffee cup

Is 3:1 good enough? It depends.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

Here’s a quick exercise: Choose any person in your work life or personal life. Now think back to last few interactions you had with that person. Recall what was said and classify your list into two groups.

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What interactions, comments and questions did you have with your chosen person that were negative? Here are some examples of things that are in the “negative” group:
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What Can ChatGPT Do for Accounting Professionals?

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The dawning of new technologies is usually daunting, but this is one we should all be excited to try.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

ChatGPT has been in the news almost daily. It’s the latest “hot” technology. You might be wondering what’s so great about it, i.e., what can it do for accountants?

 

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When we answer that question, we really need to answer a couple of questions. First, what can it not do, or what shouldn’t we use it for? And second, what tasks are safe or low-risk that we can use it for to increase our productivity?

MORE: Make the Most of CPE Conferences | Set Bold New Goals for the Rest of the Year | Generative AI: Should You Avoid It or Adopt It? | Five Ways to Acquire More Clients | Five Stages of Any Business | Leverage Your Client List Today | Need Leads? Try a Quiz
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First, we’ll look at what not to use ChatGPT for and then we’ll look at what you should be using it for. Last, we’ll examine two rules to follow when using ChatGPT.
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Make the Most of CPE Conferences

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female speaker standing in front of screen, speaking to audience

Three ways to maximize your ROI.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

Attending and learning from conferences can be amazing opportunities for your career or your business. They can also be huge money drains. It’s easy to take a look at the conference registration and make a quick decision about whether we can afford it – or even worse – whether it will clear our credit card limit or not.

MORE: Set Bold New Goals for the Rest of the Year | Generative AI: Should You Avoid It or Adopt It? | Want Better Clients? Here’s How | Get Your Name in the News | Five Ideas for More Summer Revenue | Four Ways Small Firms Can Beat Large Ones | Why You Need a Link-In-Bio Tool
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

A smart business owner will take a bit different approach. Here’s how to calculate how much revenue or increase in price you need to justify the expense of attending a conference.
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Set Bold New Goals for the Rest of the Year

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Latina woman working on laptop

Use four metrics to measure change, progress and success.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

Think back to this day one year ago for just a minute. Where were you in your business? What were your revenues, salary and profits at that time? What were your clients like? What were your biggest issues?

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If we don’t occasionally look back to take a snapshot at a point in our history, we may not realize how much we’ve accomplished in such a short time. I’m not much for dwelling in the past, but this exercise is tremendously useful for a couple of reasons:
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Another Year, Another Chance

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Another opportunity to fine-tune your business.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

I was drawn to reading Howard Buffett’s book “40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World” because I am completely intrigued by huge social problems and figuring out ways to solve them. For Buffett, who is a farmer at heart, the challenge is how to tackle world hunger.

MORE: Want Better Clients? Here’s How | Track Six Figures to Test Your Marketing | When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know | Eight Things to Give New Clients | Put Your LinkedIn Profile to Work | What’s In a (Domain) Name? Plenty
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One of the stories in the book has Buffett listening to a lecture for farmers on how to improve their yield year after year. Buffett recalls the speaker saying that one farmer, on average, will have a 40-year career from the time he or she starts working the land to the time to retire. On average it will be 40 harvests and 40 plantings.
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Want Better Clients? Here’s How

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Five ways to find the sweet spot for your target client.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

Many accountants serve clients with extremely small businesses that gross six figures a year or even less. These clients are prone to being price-sensitive and often struggle with budgets and cash flow. If you’re serving these clients, you’re definitely meeting an important need in the marketplace, but you may also start to question your own prices, or worse, underprice your services.

MORE: Five Ways to Acquire More Clients | Get Your Name in the News | Five Ideas for More Summer Revenue | Four Ways Small Firms Can Beat Large Ones | Why You Need a Link-In-Bio Tool | Five Emotional Skills for Entrepreneurs | Transform Your Marketing with CRM | Five Kinds of Small Thinking
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The good news is that, on average, the higher revenues a company earns, the more likely they are to be a higher-quality client for you. Owners with larger companies, on average, are less price-sensitive and less emotional about running their businesses. The sweet spot for many small CPA firms and bookkeeping companies is to attract clients from $1 million to $3 million all the way up to about $10 million to $20 million in annual revenues. So how do you get to these higher-quality clients? Here are five ideas:
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