Manage Your Clients and Don’t Let Them Manage You

All accounting firm owners should know how to manage their clients. Do not let your clients manage you or else they will drag you into their nightmare. Educating clients is a Balance Sheet investment. Make sure you don’t neglect this very important task.

At Wize, we use the Acknowledgement letter template that our community can amend to suit their own business as the educational activity with your clients is on “...how you do it here….”.

The goal is to get 80% of clients doing it your way. Then the other 20% should be easy to manage. But when 80% of clients do it their way, it creates chaos in your business. So start educating and managing them from the moment they come on board as new clients. It’s a lot easier to start this way versus trying to change existing clients’ habits. Here are some ways you can go about this:

1. All meetings must be booked in advance. An agenda must be provided.
2. Bring the Senior Client Manager into the meeting with you either right upfront depending on the agenda or at the end to pass on instructions for implementation, so you are always educating the client of the team that has been set up to take care of them. Eventually, they just go directly to the SCM.
3. With emails or phone calls, give 5 minutes for free, and beyond that, it’s charged and managed in the following manner/process:

• • Discovery (identify their problem) through email or conversation.
  • Proposal sent with the price quoted.
  • Production starts only after a proposal has been accepted.

The most successful operators are those that go from Discovery to Proposal in the least amount of time.

This has the following benefits:

1. You don’t give all your intellectual property away for free.
2. You don’t waste time doing the task and not get paid for it. Reduce wasted debt collecting time.
3. You don’t leave any money on the table.
4. It’s structured and staff can follow it. In other words, no production occurs until proposals have been accepted. Eventually, you will start looking at the number of proposals that went out each day as that is your indicator of how successful the day has been. It’s fun tracking the proposals being accepted.
5. A cooling-off period whilst they consider the proposal because often their requests are “throwaway lines” and they are not serious but you end up spending time on their tasks only to end up writing it off. At least if they don’t accept the proposal, you haven’t lost any time on their job. You can get paid to get on with the next task.

It’s important that you and especially your staff follow a formal procedure otherwise it will get out of control as the team gets larger.