I wonder if I could gather the opinions of other users of this forum. I run an Accountancy practice in Sheffield working from home. One of the services I offer is Bookkeeping. I charge this out at £20 per hour. This includes recording all of the day to day transactions, preparing and submitting to HMRC Vat returns for VAT registered businesses. I also offer monthly/quarterly management accounts for businesses that require this service. Is £20 per hour in the north of England too expensive. I am on page 1 of Google for Bookkeepers in Sheffield and find it strange I am not getting any enquiries for Bookkeeping services.
I wouldn't describe management accounts as bookkeeping. It's probably no help at all, but I was charging £25 per hour in Berkshire 10-15 years ago, and had one client in Huddersfield paying this rate, so not too far from you. However, I was mostly doing management accounts, and trained my clients to do most of their own bookkeeping. If someone wanted to me to do their bookkeeping, the price was the same, and I did it for a few clients, but it wasn't what my business was about. I noticed a real split in potential clients I met. When I told some what I could do for them, the reaction was "Wow!, I didn't know that was possible. Will you do it for me please?", while others stared at me blankly and wondered what the point of it was.
I assume this is you www.millhouses-accountancy.co.uk/fees-accountant-services-in-sheffield.php. How many people know what management accounts are, and appreciate that they may be useful to them? I'm sure some businesses will look at your hourly rate and think they can get bookkeeping done for a fiver an hour, and management accounts, whatever they are, are of no interest or use to them, so see no point in paying you silly money for them.
Would offering bookkeeping separately at a lower rate, and management accounts as an optional extra at a higher rate work? Maybe you'd attract the clients looking for bookkeeping, and once they know how good you are, you can introduce them to the wonders of management accounts.
This is how I'm describing what I offer, when I finally get to restart my business after my 10 year break: "I help sole traders and small companies transform the necessary chore of keeping accounts into a valuable resource to manage their business." No idea if it will work yet, but I'm not saying I offer management accounts, just that I can do things with their paperwork that will help them.
You're taking a massive leap. You're assuming that because you are on page one that it's your price that's wrong. It could be a huge number of things that are wrong, and without further testing it would be wrong to assume that it's the price of your services.
How many visitors are you getting to your site per month? What are they doing when they are on your page? What type of businesses are you targeting and how are you using your site to show that you are an expert in this field? Are you using a method of collecting details for a mailing list or hoping that people visit your site and then just phone you? What incentive are you giving your visitors? Are you being clear about your call to action?
If you're getting enough visitors to make a comparison, you could try having two versions of the page, one like it is now, and one with a different offer, and set up so half your visitors see one, and the other half see the other, then monitor the response. It's something that's covered further on in the marketing course I'm doing at the moment, so I've got more to learn about it!
If you're getting enough visitors to make a comparison, you could try having two versions of the page, one like it is now, and one with a different offer, and set up so half your visitors see one, and the other half see the other, then monitor the response.
This type of tactic is only really useful when you are getting a huge umber of visitors and they are interacting with the site. From the OP's post it would seem not to be the case. It's far more important to make sure you have the primary bases covered before moving on to this kind of thing.
