There are essentially just six ways in which you can make more profits as an accountant, or indeed as any professional adviser:
- Increase your charges – for doing the same work you have always done
- Increase the perceived value of what you do
- Speed up collection of your fees (and so reduce the funding costs of the business)
- Reduce the time you spend providing your services whilst keeping your fees the same as before
- Provide more value and charge more than you did before NB: this is not just ‘doing more work’
- Provide additional services and charge for these
There are 2 supplmentary things you can do
- Get existing (good) clients to introduce new prospects just like them
- Sack the duff d-list clients who get in the way
Can you think of anything else that you do (that doesn’t fit under one or other of these headings)?
There’s one obvious way of increasing profits you didn’t mention:
Get extra clients other than by referrals.
Good point Peter. It’s a while since I compiled the list but I think there may be a reason I focused on getting extra work only through referrals. This is because the time and money it takes to generate extra clients any other way is far more costly and may not be worth the time and effort – until you have exhausted all of the other (listed) ways you could increase your profits.