It’s still about attracting clients

Each year, I teach roughly 25-30 hours of CPE, both at live events and online.

Bear with me, as this is not an advertorial for my presentation services as impressive as they are if I say so myself in all immodesty, so you can stop rolling your eyes.

No, today’s missive is about the top challenges that firms are currently facing and likely will be well into the future.

In virtually all my presentations, I have one PowerPoint slide emblazoned with the bold headline “What’s keeping CPAs awake at night?”

It showcases the results of a number of surveys which state that far and away a firm’s No. 1 challenge is that of attracting new clients. For those who follow the profession closely, this may not exactly come as breaking news.

More recently, I read an article which published the results of an operations and technology survey that canvassed the key decision makers at more than 600 accounting firms in all 50 states about their critical technology and operations challenges.

While managing workflow reigned as the top technology challenge, more than 70 percent of those firms reinforced my frequent presentation slide claiming that attracting new clients was unquestionably their top challenge.

Trailing the dilemma of new client gains were cost savings and practice improvement, which I venture to guess would be universal concerns at most practices.

In my 15 years associated in one way or another with the accounting profession, I’ve probably sat through 50 or so sessions on strategies revolving around new business development.

For those Baby Boomers who received their CPA license in the late 1970s or early 1980s you may remember working at a firm early in your  career where new client development often fell under the purview of the managing partner.

Trouble was that the managing partner already had a job – that of running the firm – as well as managing their own books of business. And truth be told, few, if any, were trained in sales and marketing.

So new client gains often occurred at what can charitably be described as “glacial” in pace.

Fast forward about 30 years or so.

Today many firms deploy business development specialists, many of whom are trained marketing and sales professionals and are not necessarily CPAs.

But bringing someone like that on board is only half the battle in the war for new clients. Your firm also has to be attractive and distinguish itself from the competition to entice a potential client to transition from their current firm to yours.

And having current technology in place will unquestionably give you the proverbial leg up.

But that’s a column for another day.