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:
- All meetings must be booked in advance. An agenda must be provided.
- 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.
- With emails or phone calls, give 5 minutes for free and beyond that, it’s charged and managed in the following manner/process:
(a) Discovery (identify their problem) through email or conversation.
(b) Proposal sent with price quoted
(c) 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:
- You don’t give all your intellectual property away for free.
- You don’t waste time doing the task and not get paid for it. Reduce wasted debt collecting time.
- You don’t leave any money on the table.
- 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.
- 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 for getting 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.
PLUS: Whenever you’re ready… here are 4 ways we can help you grow your accounting/bookkeeping practice:
1. You’d be mad not to join our free accountants’ mastermind group.
The Wize Accountants Mastermind group is your new online community where we are sharing daily insights, tips, and free tools to grow your practice – 2k+ practice owners & growing — https://www.facebook.com/groups/wizemastermind
2. Accelerate your practice growth – take a free trial
We’ve just released our updated online practice acceleration system which will help you free up time, hire the right staff, fix your broken systems and scale your practice. We are looking for 3 practice owners right now to trial WizePulse. See if you qualify – https://www.wizementoring.com/pulse2021
3. Find qualified talent for your practice
If you’re looking to hire qualified staff, we have a pool of talented candidates around the world and a proven step-by-step recruitment process to follow. Want access to it? find out how – https://www.wizementoring.com/wizetalent
4. Build your practice to run without you
If you’d like to know how to scale your practice beyond 7-figures whilst buying back your time, find out here – https://www.messenger.com/t/wize.mentoring.92