I have just joined the forum. I recently started my own bookkeeping business and have decided that I wish to be selective in the work I accept, namely only one or two high value accounts. This is because of recent experience and what appears to me to be the large amount of time spent for little return on many small accounts. The other reason is that I want to be a bookkeeper rather than a salesman.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to selectively market to this end?
Unfortunately you have to be a salesman to do your marketing! People will not come knocking on your door by chance. You have to promote yourself to your chosen audience.
High value accounts will be very hard, if not impossible to come by, as they will have their own staff to do the job for them in house. Plus they would want you to work on a full time basis for their work and not others and may well chose a firm of accountants in the first place.
Marketing is a hard slog, website and SEO, mailshots, letters, word of mouth, networking, knocking on doors.
The other issue about having a few high value clients is how you sustain yourself if one were to move their business elsewhere, or indeed in this climate, disappear altogether.
The good thing about having many smaller clients is that it spreads that risk.
The views expressed in this post are my own personal (HRA protected) views, and are not representative of any organisation I have any involvement with.
Hi Robin, I have decided myself to work Full Time employed as a bookkeeper and to have small bookkeping jobs as a bonus to my job as such is this not an option to you?
Good luck with your new business! My own practice has been going for a little while now and the experience I've had echoes the other comments here about many smallva few large clients.
Small clients often provide a rich and varied - but not too complex - selection of real-life accounting problems. These are great for building your experience. Real life is what the academic bookkeeping syllabus doesn't do much to prepare you for, so your early learning curve is quite likely to be fairly steep. (It certainly was for me, anyway).
So - starting out - you might find that it's helpful to consolidate your knowledge and abilities first with small clients - which should, in turn, make you more attractive to higher-value clients. Small or large, though, clients need to trust you as a professional. The further you get up that practical learning curve, the easier you'll find it to engender that trust.
