the small firm and solo practice

make the most of cpe conferences

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female speaker standing in front of screen, speaking to audience

three ways to maximize your roi.

by sandi leyva
the complete guide to marketing for tax & accounting firms

attending and learning from conferences can be amazing opportunities for your career or your business. they can also be huge money drains. it’s easy to take a look at the conference registration and make a quick decision about whether we can afford it – or even worse – whether it will clear our credit card limit or not.

more: set bold new goals for the rest of the year | generative ai: should you avoid it or adopt it? | want better clients? here’s how | get your name in the news | five ideas for more summer revenue | four ways small firms can beat large ones | why you need a link-in-bio tool
goprocpa.comexclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.

a smart business owner will take a bit different approach. here’s how to calculate how much revenue or increase in price you need to justify the expense of attending a conference.
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set bold new goals for the rest of the year

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latina woman working on laptop

use four metrics to measure change, progress and success.

by sandi leyva
the complete guide to marketing for tax & accounting firms

think back to this day one year ago for just a minute. where were you in your business? what were your revenues, salary and profits at that time? what were your clients like? what were your biggest issues?

more: generative ai: should you avoid it or adopt it? | beyond compliance: six tips for adding value | track six figures to test your marketing | when you don’t know what you don’t know | eight things to give new clients | five ideas for summer focus | leverage your client list today | need leads? try a quiz | now’s the time to clean up your email list
goprocpa.comexclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.

if we don’t occasionally look back to take a snapshot at a point in our history, we may not realize how much we’ve accomplished in such a short time. i’m not much for dwelling in the past, but this exercise is tremendously useful for a couple of reasons:
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another year, another chance

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another opportunity to fine-tune your business.

by sandi leyva
the complete guide to marketing for tax & accounting firms

i was drawn to reading howard buffett’s book “40 chances: finding hope in a hungry world” because i am completely intrigued by huge social problems and figuring out ways to solve them. for buffett, who is a farmer at heart, the challenge is how to tackle world hunger.

more: want better clients? here’s how | track six figures to test your marketing | when you don’t know what you don’t know | eight things to give new clients | put your linkedin profile to work | what’s in a (domain) name? plenty
goprocpa.comexclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.

one of the stories in the book has buffett listening to a lecture for farmers on how to improve their yield year after year. buffett recalls the speaker saying that one farmer, on average, will have a 40-year career from the time he or she starts working the land to the time to retire. on average it will be 40 harvests and 40 plantings.
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want better clients? here’s how

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five ways to find the sweet spot for your target client.

by sandi leyva
the complete guide to marketing for tax & accounting firms

many accountants serve clients with extremely small businesses that gross six figures a year or even less. these clients are prone to being price-sensitive and often struggle with budgets and cash flow. if you’re serving these clients, you’re definitely meeting an important need in the marketplace, but you may also start to question your own prices, or worse, underprice your services.

more: five ways to acquire more clients | get your name in the news | five ideas for more summer revenue | four ways small firms can beat large ones | why you need a link-in-bio tool | five emotional skills for entrepreneurs | transform your marketing with crm | five kinds of small thinking
goprocpa.comexclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.

the good news is that, on average, the higher revenues a company earns, the more likely they are to be a higher-quality client for you. owners with larger companies, on average, are less price-sensitive and less emotional about running their businesses. the sweet spot for many small cpa firms and bookkeeping companies is to attract clients from $1 million to $3 million all the way up to about $10 million to $20 million in annual revenues. so how do you get to these higher-quality clients? here are five ideas:
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track six figures to test your marketing

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it’s time to break out the spreadsheets. hurray!

by sandi leyva
the complete guide to marketing for tax & accounting firms

one way to help accountants embrace marketing is to fill training sessions with spreadsheets and numbers, things that most accountants love working on. there’s a lot of insecurity around learning marketing, but when accountants hear they need to do some spreadsheets first, they dive right in.

more: five ways to acquire more clients | get your name in the news | five ideas for more summer revenue | four ways small firms can beat large ones | why you need a link-in-bio tool | five emotional skills for entrepreneurs | transform your marketing with crm
goprocpa.comexclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.

here are six numbers we suggest you track:

1. closing ratio

as qualified leads come from your marketing efforts into your sales funnel, it’s a good idea to track how many of these leads you’re able to close into business. your closing ratio is the percentage of successes divided by the total number of qualified leads you make proposals to.
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five ways to acquire more clients

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laughing businesswoman talking on the phone in office in front of four monitorsbut don’t bother with #5 if you don’t do #1, #2, #3 and #4 first.

by sandi leyva
the complete guide to marketing for tax & accounting firms

if getting new clients is a bit of a struggle for your business and you’re not reaching the revenue levels you desire because of too few clients, then the first step is to find out where the process is breaking down.

more: get your name in the news | when you don’t know what you don’t know | eight things to give new clients | put your linkedin profile to work | what’s in a (domain) name? plenty | four tips for tough times | nine thoughts on self-marketing for the introvert | three questions for the new year
goprocpa.comexclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.

there are five main places:

1. client retention

are you keeping the clients you acquire, or are you experiencing too much churn in your client base? you can measure your retention rate year after year by computing the percent of total annual revenues that is due to repeat clients. if it’s less than 80 percent, then you are either in your first year of business or you have a problem.
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get your name in the news

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10 triggers for free publicity.

by sandi leyva
the complete guide to marketing for tax & accounting firms

as a marketing channel, public relations is one of my personal favorites. it includes getting mentioned in news or trade media and publications, having an article you wrote published or reprinted, applying for and winning awards, or otherwise being in the public eye for one reason or another.

more: when you don’t know what you don’t know | five stages of any business | five ideas for summer focus | leverage your client list today | need leads? try a quiz | now’s the time to clean up your email list
goprocpa.comexclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.

when i started a photography studio several years ago, i sent sample photos of my work along with a letter explaining my business to several news outlets. it was july, and in august, the sunday magazine supplement to the dallas morning news picked up the story and published my samples. they were portraits of cats and dogs, and my phone rang for days. within a week, i was booked through christmas, and my business broke even a year ahead of time because of that one piece of publicity.
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when you don’t know what you don’t know

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blindfolded at computerhazards at every stage.

by sandi leyva
the complete guide to marketing for tax & accounting firms

early in my career, one of my favorite things to teach was maslow’s four stages of learning. i still think it’s one of the most valuable and profound pieces of information i have come across in my learning.

more: five stages of any business | five ideas for more summer revenue | eight things to give new clients | five ideas for summer focus | four ways small firms can beat large ones | put your linkedin profile to work | leverage your client list today | why you need a link-in-bio tool | what’s in a (domain) name? plenty | need leads? try a quiz | five emotional skills for entrepreneurs
goprocpa.comexclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.

maybe you recall, too:

  1. unconscious incompetence
  2. conscious incompetence
  3. conscious competence
  4. unconscious competence

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five stages of any business

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growing stacks of blocks with an arrow tracing upwardevolve from running a practice to leading a business.

by sandi leyva
the complete guide to marketing for tax & accounting firms

technology has allowed just about everyone to start their own businesses. we can do something part time, full time or in between. we can start and stop our businesses. we can be successful at lots of different business models. and we can go through stages of our business.

more: five ideas for more summer revenue | eight things to give new clients | five ideas for summer focus | four ways small firms can beat large ones | put your linkedin profile to work | leverage your client list today | why you need a link-in-bio tool | what’s in a (domain) name? plenty | need leads? try a quiz | five emotional skills for entrepreneurs | four tips for tough times
goprocpa.comexclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.

if you want to grow exponentially, or even linearly, you’ll need to progress. and before you can do that, it makes sense to figure out where you are now. here are five stages of business so you can see where you are now and where you want to go.
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five ideas for more summer revenue

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number 5 drawn in sandbonus: you could make busy season easier.

by sandi leyva
the complete guide to marketing for tax & accounting firms

for some of you, summer can be a slow time in your business. if you do taxes, all the action is during busy season and in september if you have a lot of extensions. if you’re a bookkeeper, your busiest month is january. and if you do software consulting or training, it slows down in july and august.

more: eight things to give new clients | five ideas for summer focus | leverage your client list today | need leads? try a quiz | now’s the time to clean up your email list | don’t let prospects fall through the cracks | five lessons my clients taught me | how to fire a client | five tips for virtual team member happiness
goprocpa.comexclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.

if you have a good relationship with your clients, you might be able to move some of your busy season work to off season. and if you have clients who are ready to take advantage of new technologies, there are lots of opportunities in the cloud. here are five quick ideas to stir up some revenue in the slower summer months.
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eight things to give new clients

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woman and man shaking hands across a deskset expectations early.

by sandi leyva
the complete guide to marketing for tax & accounting firms

how you welcome your new client can set the tone for a relationship that could last for years or in the worst of cases, just days. start out on the right foot by looking super-organized (because that’s part of why we get hired anyway) and making it super-easy for a client to get on board with you.

more: five ideas for summer focus | four ways small firms can beat large ones | why you need a link-in-bio tool | five emotional skills for entrepreneurs | transform your marketing with crm
goprocpa.comexclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.

the best vehicle for this is a welcome kit. here are eight things that should be in your kit at a minimum:
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five ideas for summer focus

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calm balanced businessman sitting outdoors on bench in yoga lotus pose meditating, with office building and blue sky in backgroundwhat do you need to rock out … if anything?

by sandi leyva
the complete guide to marketing for tax & accounting firms

with so much to do as business owners, we can get pretty overwhelmed at times. we can start believing that we have a “time” problem, but because all of us have 24/7, there really is no such thing as a time problem.

more: four ways small firms can beat large ones | put your linkedin profile to work | five emotional skills for entrepreneurs | transform your marketing with crm | five kinds of small thinking | five tests: how open are you to change?
goprocpa.comexclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.

what you might have is a “focus” problem. here are five ideas to find your focus so that you can actually get something done this summer that you’ll benefit from.
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