THE SMALL FIRM AND SOLO PRACTICE

Calculate Your Business Relationship Ratios

By

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.

MORE: What Can ChatGPT Do for Accounting Professionals? | Make the Most of CPE Conferences | Beyond Compliance: Six Tips for Adding Value | 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
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

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:
READ MORE →

What Can ChatGPT Do for Accounting Professionals?

By

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?

 

New Course: Are you looking for an accounting-specific course on ChatGPT?  We have one right here! 

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
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

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.
READ MORE →

Make the Most of CPE Conferences

By

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.
READ MORE →

Set Bold New Goals for the Rest of the Year

By

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?

MORE: Generative AI: Should You Avoid It or Adopt It? | Beyond Compliance: Six Tips for Adding Value | Track Six Figures to Test Your Marketing | When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know | Eight Things to Give New Clients | Five Ideas for Summer Focus | Leverage Your Client List Today | Need Leads? Try a Quiz | Now’s the Time to Clean Up Your Email List
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

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:
READ MORE →

Another Year, Another Chance

By

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
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

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.
READ MORE →

Want Better Clients? Here’s How

By

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
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

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:
READ MORE →

Track Six Figures to Test Your Marketing

By

It’s time to break out the spreadsheets. Hurray!

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

One way to help accountants embrace marketing is to fill training sessions with spreadsheets and numbers, things that most accountants love working on. There’s a lot of insecurity around learning marketing, but when accountants hear they need to do some spreadsheets first, they dive right in.

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
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

Here are six numbers we suggest you track:

1. Closing ratio

As qualified leads come from your marketing efforts into your sales funnel, it’s a good idea to track how many of these leads you’re able to close into business. Your closing ratio is the percentage of successes divided by the total number of qualified leads you make proposals to.
READ MORE →

Five Ways to Acquire More Clients

By

Laughing businesswoman talking on the phone in office in front of four monitorsBut don’t bother with #5 if you don’t do #1, #2, #3 and #4 first.

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

If getting new clients is a bit of a struggle for your business and you’re not reaching the revenue levels you desire because of too few clients, then the first step is to find out where the process is breaking down.

MORE: Get Your Name in the News | 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 | Four Tips for Tough Times | Nine Thoughts on Self-Marketing for the Introvert | Three Questions for the New Year
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

There are five main places:

1. Client Retention

Are you keeping the clients you acquire, or are you experiencing too much churn in your client base? You can measure your retention rate year after year by computing the percent of total annual revenues that is due to repeat clients. If it’s less than 80 percent, then you are either in your first year of business or you have a problem.
READ MORE →

Get Your Name in the News

By

10 triggers for free publicity.

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

As a marketing channel, public relations is one of my personal favorites. It includes getting mentioned in news or trade media and publications, having an article you wrote published or reprinted, applying for and winning awards, or otherwise being in the public eye for one reason or another.

MORE: When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know | Five Stages of Any Business | Five Ideas for Summer Focus | Leverage Your Client List Today | Need Leads? Try a Quiz | Now’s the Time to Clean Up Your Email List
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

When I started a photography studio several years ago, I sent sample photos of my work along with a letter explaining my business to several news outlets. It was July, and in August, the Sunday magazine supplement to the Dallas Morning News picked up the story and published my samples. They were portraits of cats and dogs, and my phone rang for days. Within a week, I was booked through Christmas, and my business broke even a year ahead of time because of that one piece of publicity.
READ MORE →

When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

By

blindfolded at computerHazards at every stage.

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

Early in my career, one of my favorite things to teach was Maslow’s four stages of learning. I still think it’s one of the most valuable and profound pieces of information I have come across in my learning.

MORE: Five Stages of Any Business | Five Ideas for More Summer Revenue | Eight Things to Give New Clients | Five Ideas for Summer Focus | Four Ways Small Firms Can Beat Large Ones | Put Your LinkedIn Profile to Work | Leverage Your Client List Today | Why You Need a Link-In-Bio Tool | What’s In a (Domain) Name? Plenty | Need Leads? Try a Quiz | Five Emotional Skills for Entrepreneurs
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

Maybe you recall, too:

  1. Unconscious incompetence
  2. Conscious incompetence
  3. Conscious competence
  4. Unconscious competence

READ MORE →

Five Stages of Any Business

By

Growing stacks of blocks with an arrow tracing upwardEvolve from running a practice to leading a business.

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

Technology has allowed just about everyone to start their own businesses. We can do something part time, full time or in between. We can start and stop our businesses. We can be successful at lots of different business models. And we can go through stages of our business.

MORE: Five Ideas for More Summer Revenue | Eight Things to Give New Clients | Five Ideas for Summer Focus | Four Ways Small Firms Can Beat Large Ones | Put Your LinkedIn Profile to Work | Leverage Your Client List Today | Why You Need a Link-In-Bio Tool | What’s In a (Domain) Name? Plenty | Need Leads? Try a Quiz | Five Emotional Skills for Entrepreneurs | Four Tips for Tough Times
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

If you want to grow exponentially, or even linearly, you’ll need to progress. And before you can do that, it makes sense to figure out where you are now. Here are five stages of business so you can see where you are now and where you want to go.
READ MORE →

Five Ideas for More Summer Revenue

By

number 5 drawn in sandBONUS: You could make busy season easier.

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

For some of you, summer can be a slow time in your business. If you do taxes, all the action is during busy season and in September if you have a lot of extensions. If you’re a bookkeeper, your busiest month is January. And if you do software consulting or training, it slows down in July and August.

MORE: Eight Things to Give New Clients | Five Ideas for Summer Focus | Leverage Your Client List Today | Need Leads? Try a Quiz | Now’s the Time to Clean Up Your Email List | Don’t Let Prospects Fall through the Cracks | Five Lessons My Clients Taught Me | How to Fire a Client | Five Tips for Virtual Team Member Happiness
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

If you have a good relationship with your clients, you might be able to move some of your busy season work to off season. And if you have clients who are ready to take advantage of new technologies, there are lots of opportunities in the cloud. Here are five quick ideas to stir up some revenue in the slower summer months.
READ MORE →