Hi. I've recently found the forum so thought I'd better introduce myself.
I'm Ruth, a mum of 4 from Sussex. My background pre-children is in banking, as part of which I did the Associateship of the Chartered Institute of Bankers/BSc (Hons) in financial services which introduced my to basic accountancy. I stopped working when I had my eldest daughter but then I needed to do something after my son was born and bookkeeping seemed like an obvious choice, so I took the ICB exams, got my license to practice and worked self employed from home for 18 months. I then stopped working again when I had my third child, that was nearly 5 years ago. Fast forward to today and now that my family is complete I've decided to ressurrect my old business and hopfully, once my youngest is a little older, start on that accountancy exams (I'd have exemption from the first few).
Unfortunately I let my ICB membership lapse so at the moment I'm redoing the exams to requalify. Last time I got my clients from word of mouth and ICB leads, but I'm just starting to think about how to promote myself to get up and running again. I should have finished the exams by about this time next month and I'm going to be offering bookkeeping, payroll and SA tax returns, as before.
So that's me. I'm looking forward to joining the discussions.
Just doing my morning woosh through last nights messages but hope to chat later.
Welcome to the forum.
Shaun.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Hi Ruth and welcome. We put up with the other banker and he chips in with the odd useful comment so you should be ok here!
Getting clients is a much discussed topic here and if you look at some of the posts I'm sure you will get some good tips. Word of mouth is brilliant but people need to know you are back in business, which means getting your face known. See what networking opportunities there are and go to as many as you can. The results are unlikely to be immediately apparent but after a while you will get referrals from all sorts of places and people you had long given up any hope for. I spoke to someone this morning at a breakfast networking event and he picked up some business last week from a guy he met three years ago, but they kept his card and gave him a call. He was on holiday at the time but I operate a telephone answering service and took the call for him so I knoww it's true! It is useful to be able to 'sell' the benefits of your service in a 60 second slot, so that's worth perfecting over the many meetings and if possible to have a usp so you stand out from the crowd.
