Accounting Firm Growth Strategy: What Works in 2024 📊📈

Just like any new business, getting your accounting firm off the ground (and beyond) can be a challenge. Attracting new clients, building your firm's reputation, and developing long-term client relationships are all essential for helping you thrive.

You also need to ensure you harness the right technologies that'll put you above your competition, and keep an eye on industry trends.

Not sure where to begin? Read our accounting firm growth strategy guide for 2024 and work towards sustainable growth.

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Many Accounting Firms Don't Use the Right Technology. Don't be Them

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Offering accounting services takes time; you're essentially swapping time for money. Not too long ago, it was necessary for accountants to hire more staff to cater to more clients and ultimately grow their business further.

Of course, this requires more investment in hiring and training employees. It may even be necessary to invest in larger premises, and more equipment like computers, desks, and chairs.

As a result, rather than making those investments, many accounting firms maintained those time restraints that inevitably hindered growth.

What's the Solution?

Using the right technology is the key to pushing those boundaries of time.

Although technological advancements can free up significant time for accounting firms, many are yet to implement them effectively. Your accounting firm can use automation technology to automate tasks, generate and analyse reports, and calculate figures like taxes and COGS.

The extensive capabilities of software available in 2024 means you can create a streamlined, unified system that optimises practice management and growth. From marketing and client communication, to client onboarding and payroll, there's a tool out there to make running your accounting firm easier (and quicker!)

Because technology can play a big part in growing your accounting practice, we'll be going through technology specifics a little later in this article.

The Biggest Problems for Accountants Trying to Grow Their Firm

Accounting firms face plenty of problems when they're trying to grow. Let's take a look at some of the biggest ones:

Lack of Time

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As explored above, a lack of time to take on additional clients is one of the biggest problems you might face when you're trying to grow your accounting firm.

But when it comes to running your firm, it's not just the tasks associated with taking on new clients that can be a drain on your time and resources. There are a number of other tasks that eat into your workday, such as:

• Marketing
• Networking
• Training employees
• Managing your payroll
• Writing proposals for prospective clients
• Keeping up to date with industry developments
• Chasing up payments

Small Audience

Hopefully at this point you've already got your website and blog up and running. But without an audience, few people are going to see what you have to offer. To grow your accounting firm, you'll need to grow your audience. This means attracting potential clients to your website through social media channels, paid ads, and search engines. Aim for a mixture of long-term organic growth and paid advertising.

Tight Budget

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Regardless of the growth strategy you use for your accounting firm, it'll take some monetary investment on your part. There are a number of things you can do to keep the costs low. Networking, for example, and using search engine optimization techniques to help your accounting practice website get found organically in search engines.

If you've got a small budget, you can aim for steady growth and increase your budget slowly as you take on new business. An effective marketing strategy can help you get the most out of your budget and generate a greater ROI.

Little Technological Knowledge

Using a new technology will always come with a learning curve. But if you've been doing manual accounting, or even just relying Excel, incorporating a variety of software into your accounting practice will seem all the more daunting.

It's important to choose technology that's going to help and not hinder your efforts to grow your accounting practice. For this reason, we recommend researching different tools and software for their ease-of-use and the level of support offered. Lots of software companies also have guides and manuals on how to use their products. And many software products are specifically aimed at accountancy firms.

8 Strategies to Grow Your Accounting Firm

1. Choose the right technology
2. Implement effective marketing methods
3. Provide an excellent customer experience
4. Build a team of experts
5. Develop Your USPs
6. Expand your offerings
7. Go niche
8. Create additional income streams

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Strategy #1: Choose the Right Technology

Our first accounting firm growth strategy is choosing the right technology. The right tools will make your life so much easier. One of the biggest plus points of online accounting solutions is the opportunity to automate different tasks.

The more automation you can get working for you, the more time you'll have to focus on managing client accounts, developing client relationships, and growing your accounting practice.

Types of Technology you can Opt for

So what types of technologies can you incorporate into your accounting practice? Let's take a look:

Accounting Software

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Your first investment as an accounting practice should be in accounting software. These offer a myriad of tools that'll help you grow. They'll also help your accounting firm remain organised. And when the time comes to submit tax returns, all your data will be readily available to you.

Accounting software like QuickBooks and Xero are excellent choices for accounting professionals and high growth firms. Both enable you to create professional invoices, manage expenses, inventory, and bills, and make payments through the software.

Accounting software can also give you access to practice management solutions. These include building workflows, automating recurring jobs, and managing client data effectively.

Data Consolidation Software

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This one's useful for accounting firms offering eCommerce accounting services. If you've ever had to manually input data from an eCommerce store into your accounting software, you'll understand how tedious and time-consuming this can be.

Link My Books sits snugly between your accounting software and your client's eCommerce store. It automatically gathers key financial data and transfers it from one to the other, in the form of summary invoices.

If, for example, your client has an Amazon store, you simply link your accounting software and the Amazon account to Link My Books, adjust your settings accordingly, and leave it to get to work. Link My Books also works out taxes and COGS. And, accounts for Amazon fees, shipping, and refunds, when it's generating profit and loss statements.

Expense Management Software

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Expense management software can help you manage your accountancy firm expenses (as the name suggests!). Expensify is a good example of this. You and your team can snap pictures of documents like receipts, and the software extracts key data before transferring it over to your accounting software.

Expensify automatically generates team member expense reports too, and you can automatically reimburse them for business expenses. This expense management solution also helps you reconcile and manage your clients' expense data.

Time-Tracking and Payroll Software

Time-tracking software enables you to track the time you spend with your clients so you can bill them accurately. Additionally, employees (both yours and your clients'), can manually log their time through an online portal so you have an accurate figure of what is owed.

Payroll software often, but not always, goes hand-in-hand with time-tracking software for obvious reasons. A good payroll software will help you keep compliant with employee pay rules and regulations, such as overtime, paid time off, and pensions. Many such software have automation elements too.

QuickBooks and Xero both have the option to add payroll onto your subscription. But there are many other solutions out there, such as Gusto and ADP.

Strategy #2: Implement Effective Marketing Methods

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The next strategy to grow your accounting firm is to implement effective marketing methods. Without a good marketing strategy, you'll struggle to get your firm off the ground. Marketing has a number of clear purposes:

• Communicate messages: With marketing, you can communicate your company's messages with your audience.
• Convey expertise: Use marketing tactics to position yourself as an authority in your niche.
• Generate interest: Marketing methods can help generate interest in your accounting firm and what you have to say.
• Understand your audience: Analyse communications and conversations to learn who your target audience is, and their expectations.
• Lead generation: Generate leads by inviting potential clients to subscribe or fill in a form on your website.
• Increase your client base: The end goal of marketing is ultimately to generate new sales, but familiarity and trust would normally come before the sales process.

Marketing Options

Let's go through the things you can do to grow your accounting firm with marketing strategies:

Content Marketing

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Content can include blog posts, social media posts, videos, or infographics; basically any medium that can be shared online. Content marketing is not normally about the sale though. It's normally to generate interest in your offerings. Content should be posted regularly for consistent communication. You can use a social media scheduling tool to help you with this.

The key thing to remember is to add value to clients and potential clients. Before creating your content, consider what your audience will get from reading/watching it. Will they learn how to work out their taxes, for example. Conduct market research to find out common accounting questions.

Social Media Marketing

The rise of social media opened a door for opportunities for client/business interactions. Social media channels allow you to interact with your clients in real time. And, create a community around your brand. Ensure you're responsive to any questions and comments. Encourage post sharing, and create polls and surveys to learn more about your audience.

LinkedIn is the best choice of platform for B2B. It provides professionals with networking opportunities. Although it's free, you can also choose to use paid ads to extend the reach of your profile and posts. Remember, social media isn't about the hard sell. It's all about communication, audience engagement, and knowledge sharing.

SEO

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Consider getting an SEO website audit to assess its SEO health and what you can do to improve it. Hiring an SEO professional can help you maximise your presence in search engines organically. They'll discuss long-term SEO growth strategies with you, which can generate more website visitors and leads.

Alternatively, there are a number of things you can do to improve your SEO for free. These include:

• Regularly create and update content, e.g. A new blog post each week
• Research and incorporate relevant keywords
• Submit guest posts to authority websites for backlinks
• Optimise meta titles and descriptions
• Find and fix broken backlinks

Use a free tool like Yoast SEO to guide your SEO efforts. And don't forget to track and analyse your website's performance data.

Paid Ads

Paid ads can be costly but have a good potential for ROI. Paid ads, whether through Google, Bing, or LinkedIn, can be tailored towards your goals and KPIs. They can also be tailored towards your intended audience. This means you're not wasting money on advertising to people who are unlikely to hire your firm.

You can run paid ads yourself. However, if you've never done it before, you might prefer to hire a professional to ensure you get the results you want. Ads need to include specific messages according to their purpose, a clear image (unless it's a text ad), and a link to your landing page.

Strategy #3: Provide an Excellent Customer Experience

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Most of us have had a negative customer experience. Unfortunately, this can have a detrimental impact on business. In fact, recent stats show that 72% of people switch companies if they have a negative experience with a brand.

Statistics also show that good customer service is the key to customer retention as 65% of sales come from repeat customers. And, increasing your customer retention rate by just 5% can enhance profits by 25% - 95%. Therefore, repeat customers are cheaper to market to and offer a greater ROI.

How to Measure and Improve Customer Experience

Here are some ways to measure and improve customer experience:

Measure

Measuring customer experience is actually quite simple. The easiest way to do it is by using automation technology to send surveys to clients. You can either ask for a simple score out of 10 that evaluates the whole experience. Or, you can ask specific questions about the service you provide.

For example, how customers would rate your level of communication, how likely they are to recommend your firm, and how satisfied they are with the range of services your firm provides.

Once you have a score, you could also ask for more detailed information by providing multiple choice questions, or boxes where clients can leave their own comments.

It's important to keep these surveys short. For longer ones, you might consider offering an incentive, such as the opportunity to win discounted monthly bookkeeping services or access to exclusive content.

Improve

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Once you have your benchmark measurements, work on ways to improve customer experience. Your feedback surveys might give you an indication on where you can make improvements. Here are some suggestions to get you started:

• Personalise email communication, such as newsletters and reports
• Set up automated payment reminders and thank you emails
• Ensure your team is knowledgeable for handling requests and queries
• Respond quickly to social media comments, emails, and telephone calls
• Consider adding a chatbot to your website to answer FAQs
• Reward your loyal clients to show appreciation
• Get to know your customers, their interests and their motivators so you can speak to them on their level

Continue sending out surveys to each new client so you can measure your efforts over time.

Strategy #4: Build a Team of Experts

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Your team is there to help your accounting firm grow. However, you need to ensure you equip team members with the tools and knowledge to do their jobs properly. A good training program for existing employees will go a long way in enhancing productivity within your accounting firm.

For example, gamified, interactive programs are easily accessible and can motivate your team to learn. They reward teams and individuals with points and badges when they reach set milestones or complete learning activities.

What Kinds of Experts Should You Work With?

Of course, not all expertise can be obtained through such learning programs. You might consider hiring experts in specific areas. If you're not keen on hiring on a full-time basis, or if your budget doesn't allow it, you can outsource services that'll help your accounting practice grow, such as:

• SEO specialist
• PPC specialist
• Web designer
• Copywriter or blog post writer
• Social media manager
• Marketing agency
• Web developer

And if you're ready to go the extra mile, you can onboard another qualified accountant to help ease your workload and enable you to take on more new clients.

Strategy #5: Develop Your USPs

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Your USPs (unique selling points) are the business elements that set you apart from your competitors. They are the elements that make you different and more appealing to both potential clients and existing clients. Without USPs, you're just like every other accountancy firm out there.

Along with your USPs, it's useful to articulate your company's vision and mission. These will give you an idea of what your company is all about and what direction you want to go in. They should align with other branding elements, like ToV (tone of voice) for example, so that you present a consistent brand image across all your channels of communication.

How to Develop USPs

To develop and promote your USPs:

• Brainstorming session: Note all the positives about your company and what you do well. This could be a quick service, flexibility, reasonable pricing, regular communication, or excellent support, to name a few suggestions.
• Research competitors: Take a look at competitors in the accounting industry and note where you excel compared to them. Perhaps, for example, you find lots of reviews for competitors stating poor customer service or slow responses to queries.
• Note the differences: You might not necessarily do things better than competitors. But, perhaps you do things differently. For example, you might primarily be based online rather than in a brick-and-mortar building. This might enable you to work with businesses all across the country. Perhaps you have expertise in foreign tax regulations. In this case, you might consider offering worldwide services.
• Research clients: Discover what's important to customers when it comes to accounting services. You might be the cheapest, for example, but you might find that a thorough and accurate service is more important to your clients than cost.
• Look for potential: If you can't find anything that sets you apart from competitors, is there scope for potential somewhere? Again, this is where your competitor and client research can come into play. Look for gaps and opportunities. Perhaps you have more credentials or have won awards for your services. Or maybe clients have commented positively on a particular area of your service.

Incorporate your USPs into your branding and marketing materials where appropriate.

Strategy #6: Expand Your Offerings

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Consider adding additional accounting services to clients. This will, in turn, expand your client base and give you something else to entice your clients with. If you're already doing so, you might think about adding payroll management or inventory management to your list of accounting solutions. You could also add internal auditing, for example, or forensic accounting.

How to Expand?

There are two key ways to expand your service offering; technology and learning. Some technologies can help you incorporate extra services into your accounting practice with minimum effort on your part. If you have an idea for expanding your offerings but don't have the expertise, seek out accredited courses and materials to learn from.

Another option is to mix up your pricing structure. If you currently charge clients hourly, a subscription pricing model is a different approach that works for many firms. You could create flexible plans where clients can pick and choose which services they want and the frequency in which they receive them. This model is ideal for larger teams so could be an option as your accountancy firm grows.

Strategy #7: Go Niche

On the flip side of expanding your offerings, you have the opportunity to go niche. That is, to cater to specific types of businesses or within specific niches. This growth strategy will enable you to hone in on a narrower audience. Niche accounting might seem counter-productive (because of the smaller client base), but it actually allows you to create a more personalised and relevant service for your clients.

When you target a specific market, you can provide valuable content that speaks directly to your audience. For example, if you cater to small business owners, you can create blog posts, marketing emails, and social media posts about topics that you know will resonate with them. Conversely, these topics might not be of much use to large business owners.

Strategy #8: Create Additional Income Streams

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Finally, to invest more money, you need to make more money. Use your expertise to create additional income streams for your business. This can be a risky endeavour if you're already pressed for time and resources. However, if done effectively, it can be very rewarding. There is an opportunity to earn passive income alongside your accounting business.

What Income Streams can you Create?

Here are some potentially lucrative income streams:

• Write an eBook or comprehensive guide on accounting topics
• Create educational materials and courses and offer them as part of a subscription
• Host regular podcasts about different accounting practices
• Launch a YouTube channel showcasing your expertise
• Build affiliate partnerships with technology companies
• Partner with companies that provide related (but not the same) services in your niche

How Link My Books Saves Accountants Countless Hours

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Want to know the worst-kept secret in the world of eCommerce accounting? Link My Books! Link My Books is an eCommerce automation software that can save you an average of 6 hours per month per client. If you have 10 clients, that's a massive 60 hours every month where you can focus on growing your accounting practice. This extra time will also allow you to treat each new client with the care and attention necessary to encourage repeat custom.

Benefit #1 for Accountants: Works out Your Taxes

Accountancy firms find the Link My Books tax calculation feature especially useful. Answer just a few short questions in our guided tax wizard when you're setting up, and Link My Books accurately calculates your clients' taxes on every item they sell. You can advise your clients to expand into new regional markets with confidence.

Benefit #2 for Accountants: Works Out Your COGS

Link My Books has a COGS calculation feature to save you even more time. This handy feature also eliminates mistakes within your accounts to ensure the figures you're working with to produce and analyse your reports are accurate. Accurate COGS calculations are important for a correct value of inventory. And, calculating your clients' profit margins.

Benefit #3 for Accountants: Automatic Data Transfer

Link My Books automatically transfers financial data to your accounting software. Before such software existed, accountancy firms and eCommerce businesses had to manually record this data. Now, after a quick setup process, data like sales, refunds, fees, and COGS, is seamlessly broken down and consolidated, before being sent over to accounting software.

This simple process means you can spend as little as 10 minutes per month on each client.

Benefit #4 for Accountants: Multi-Platform Capabilities

We understand that many eCommerce businesses sell across multiple platforms. Rather than handling the data from each separately, Link My Books allows you to connect multiple client stores to one account. Our software is compatible with:

• Shopify
• Amazon
• Etsy
• eBay
• TikTok Shop
• Walmart

Final Words on Your Accounting Firm’s Growth Strategy

Growing your accounting practice is a rewarding pursuit. A carefully-planned accounting firm growth strategy can help you get around the time constraints that many accountancy firms face.

Your first task is to onboard automation technology, and software for bookkeepers and accountants. Prioritise those that will free up your valuable time. And, those that'll optimise efficiency and productivity within your accounting firm as you take on new clients.

Once these technologies are in place, research the accounting practice market and develop a marketing plan to attract new clients and retain existing clients. You might also consider outsourcing expert services for particular tasks. Develop your USPs and strive to build positive client relationships.

Additionally, set your accountancy firm an annual revenue target, adopt a growth mindset, and create additional income streams to enhance and support your new business growth.

Automate Your eCommerce Bookkeeping (and Save Hours)

If you're an accounting firm looking for a simple way to automate your eCommerce bookkeeping, look no further than Link My Books. Accountancy firms trust our software to save them hours of time every month on each client. Start your free Link My Books trial today and be up and running in as little as 15 minutes. 

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