Key ways to improve profitability

At last week’s meeting of The Inner Circle for Accountants our headline discussion topic was: “Improving the profitability of your practice”

I offered an early observation that “If you don’t have profitable clients, you don’t have a profitable practice”. What I mean by this is that if your clients do not generate a profit for you, your practice won’t be profitable.

Do you know which of your clients are profitable and which are not? How would you decide and what does ‘profitable’ really mean in this context? Are some of your services more profitable than others?  During the meeting we addressed these questions and also looked in detail at some of the key ways to improve practice profitability. At the headline level these include:

• Increasing fees – focus of The Inner Circle meeting July 2018
• Reviewing payment terms and securing funds sooner than before
• Reducing time spent on onboarding, servicing and admin tasks – focus of The Inner Circle meeting June 2018
• Focusing more effort on promoting the more profitable of your services
• Increasing the services you promote to clients that they take up and willingly pay for
• Attracting and converting more of the right type of clients – focus of The Inner Circle meeting Sept 2018
• Reducing the number of D-list clients
• Reducing unproductive costs, recurring payments and inefficient support costs

At the end of the meeting, as usual, I invited all members to share their key learning points, takeaways and action points. I later included these in a detailed summary note I prepared of the key points discussed at the meeting. These notes are all stored in the online membership library* to which all members have full access.

Among the points members’ highlighted at the end of this meeting were the following:

1. Keep in mind the lifetime value of clients when considering how much time, energy and cash you can afford to invest in client ‘acquisition’.
2. Improve the promotion of your more highly profitable services rather than always leading with ‘standard’ recurring compliance services.
3. Aim to be at least as professional as a typical car mechanic is when they quote fees for additional work after you drop the car off for a simple service.

*The growing library of post meeting notes are also available to new members when they join The Inner Circle. Take a look and if you think it might help you, and you can get to London each month, feel free to schedule a call with me here>>>