5 ways that Accountants can make more profits

There are essentially just five basic approaches to making more profits as an accountant in practice:

1. Increase your charges – for doing the same work you have always done. This requires you to increase the perceived value of what you do
2. Speed up collection of your fees and so reduce your capital requirements and interest costs
3. Reduce the time you spend providing your services whilst keeping your fees the same as before. This allows you to take on more (profitable) work.
4. Provide more value and charge more than you did before NB: this is not the same as simply ‘doing more work’ for existing clients
5. Provide additional services and charge for these. Avoid preconceptions about what clients will pay.

There are also 2 supplementary 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

You will appreciate that my focus here is on generating more profits rather than on increasing your top line, for example through adding new clients secured through advertising, marketing and networking.

In my talks on this subject I tend to focus on the first 5 points above although I also cover the 2 supplementary issues and some of the less costly methods of securing new clients and turnover. In so doing I share dozens of practical, commercial and easy to implement ideas that I know are being applied by other smaller practitioners.

“How to make more profits from your smaller clients – without fancy tax schemes” will next be presented in Birmingham on the morning of Friday 21 May 2010. Full details here.

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