It still surprises many salespeople and advisers outside the profession that not every owner of an accountancy firm wants to continually grow their practice.
In wider business circles, growth is treated as an unquestioned good. More clients, more turnover, more staff, more offices. If you are not growing, the argument goes, you are stagnating. Yet that assumption doesn’t sit comfortably with the lived reality of many sole practitioner accountants.
The primary reason for this attitude is that most of your clients come back year after year. Once you’ve built a practice that generates all you want, and you’re as busy as is comfortable, why add the pressure and stress of trying to grow?
This is why, once you’ve built a solid base of recurring fees, the conversation often changes. The urgency of “more” is replaced by a quieter, more thoughtful question: What do I really want from this practice? And that leads on to asking whether anything needs to change to ensure you achieve your ambitions?
When ‘enough’ starts to look sensible
Few of the accountants I work with (or even speak with) want to double their turnover. Their focus is usually on improving the quality of what they already have.
Their focus is much more about improving the quality of what they already have. The sort of things they want are more like:
- moving long-standing legacy clients onto more commercial fee arrangements
- having better behaved clients and fewer awkward fee conversations
- reducing the pressure they feel as their practice grows (!)
- improving efficiency at every level of the firm
- evidencing the value they deliver beyond what clients can get from AI systems
- maintaining turnover while generating higher fees from their portfolio
- increasing the amount of paid-for advisory work for their clients
Above all, they want more control over their time and less of the low-level stress that so often creeps into a sole practice. Especially when the owner has no one with whom to discuss challenges, options and opportunities.
From the outside, a management consultant might look at such a firm and say, “If you are not growing, you are going backwards.” But the truth of that aphorism depends entirely on what we mean by growth.
Are we talking about client numbers, turnover, profit, service range, efficiency, free time, family time, or something more strategic?
What large firms mean by growth
Earlier in my career I was headhunted to join BDO as a partner in London. At the time the firm described itself as “Expert Advisers to Growing Businesses.”
Back then that positioning felt distinctive. No one else seemed to be talking about “growing businesses” as a specialism. It didn’t take long to realise the tagline was a clever variation on the all-too-common claim to “specialise in SMEs”.
Over 99% of UK companies are technically SMEs, so it can hardly be a niche. Likewise, most decent commercial clients are, by their nature, seeking to grow. The implicit assumption at the time was that a business that did not want to grow would stagnate, and therefore be less attractive as a client.
That logic makes sense for larger firms reliant on transactional, non-compliance deal flow and upward momentum. It’s less persuasive for a sole practitioner whose firm is built on long-term recurring relationships, where clients return year after year and there is a natural ceiling on how many people you can serve well.
Stability is not stagnation
Many sole practitioners I know reach what feels like a “nice-sized practice”. It suits their lifestyle, their appetite for risk, their limited interest in selling, and their preferred way of working. They are not trying to conquer a market. They are trying to run a commercially sensible practice that supports a good life.
Over the last year or so, a number of sole practitioners interviewed on my podcast have talked about how they realised, a while back, that their firms had grown too big. In some cases they now make more money and life is easier after scaling back. This is often because complexity has a cost that rarely shows up in the headline turnover figure.
Of course there is always movement. New clients arrive. Others retire, sell up or pass away. Over time those flows typically balance out. The practice remains broadly the same size. From the outside that might look static, but in reality subtle shifts are taking place.
The more interesting question is not whether the practice is growing, but whether it is evolving.
Evolution is a more useful ambition
Evolution might mean increasing profits without increasing turnover. It might mean improving cash flow discipline and billing confidence. It could involve shifting the balance from compliance towards advisory work, or learning to have firmer conversations about scope and value. It might simply mean redesigning how the practice runs so that you enjoy it more.
Almost every accountant I have worked with wants some form of evolution. Even those with significant growth ambitions usually discover that mindset and structure need to change before scale becomes sustainable.
Some of my mentoring clients tell me that as they grow in confidence, they begin offering more strategic, billable advice to their own clients. They adapt how they position themselves. They change how they run meetings. Gradually, the shape of the practice alters. Not necessarily bigger, but sharper, calmer and more commercially robust.
The risk of doing nothing
Continuing to do what you have always done, in the way you have always done it, is rarely enough even to stand still. AI is coming. Costs rise. Regulation tightens. Client expectations shift. Without conscious evolution, what feels stable today can quietly erode tomorrow.
So perhaps the real question is not whether your practice needs to grow. It’s whether it needs to evolve, and in which direction?
If you are comfortable with your current size but uneasy about stress levels, pricing, or client mix, that is not a failure of ambition. It is often the beginning of clarity. Growth for its own sake is rarely satisfying. Evolution, when it is deliberate, can be.
If this resonates, the next step is not to chase more work. It is to think more carefully about the work you want, the clients you want to serve, and the way you want to run your practice. That is precisely the kind of thinking we could explore in mentoring conversations.
