5 Tips for Growing Your Client Accounting Services Practice
Building a Client Accounting Services (CAS) practice is hard work. Advisory practices in general and CAS practices, in particular, are quite different from tax and assurance practices. Since many firms are still ramping up CAS practices, we’ve identified five tips for growing your CAS practice.
1. Find Your Niche
The most sought after speakers at CAS industry and cloud accounting conferences are practice leaders who have chosen a niche and successfully grown it. That’s for good reason. Whether they chose government contracting, nonprofits, or restaurant franchise groups, these speakers developed expertise in a particular segment.
Niches are indispensable when attracting and retaining clients. It’s how you separate yourself from other CAS practices. Your practice will succeed, not by trying to convince clients how you are better, but by separating yourself by how you are different. A deep understanding of your clients’ specific needs, their lifecycle, etc. sets you up for capturing that business.
Questions to ask to find a niche:
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What was your background before accounting?
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Who are your regular clients?
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Is this industry profitable?
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Is my niche specific enough?
2. Have a Client Growth Plan
Successful practices have growth plans that include marketing and business development goals. They use metrics against which they measure their performance. You may be able to build the practice by converting a couple of tax engagements to include write up but to really grow, that will likely be only one element in your overall growth plan.
3. Have a Staff Growth Plan
CAS practices often begin with a cobbled-together team of paraprofessionals, CPAs, and practice leaders. Because they are typically shared resources from assurance, tax, or consulting service lines, your CAS team’s priorities may be often subordinate to other responsibilities.
Move to a dedicated staff business model as soon as possible.
If you’re thinking “sorry, we don’t have the capacity to do that”, you may want to look into a staff augmentation firm to help with scalability. A dedicated staff business model makes you more effective by separating your internal resources. You are able to accurately analyze and project for your staff needs.
4. Secure effective marketing and sales resources
Whether sales and marketing resources are shared with the entire firm or dedicated to the CAS practice, someone must take on these key practice growth functions. A marketer should own your traditional and social marketing strategies, propagation of thought leadership, and event marketing.
Someone will also have to manage the sales process, business networking, and prequalifying opportunities. If you don’t have internal resources, the Association for Accounting Marketing #AAM has dozens of consultants who provide marketing and business development support for accounting firms.
5. Own your niche
After identifying your niche, you or members of your team must learn to be the trusted advisor in your selected space. If you want to become an advisor to associations, you must understand business models, challenges, opportunities, and trends (UBIT and non-dues revenue are huge issues in this space). Speak at conferences and educational events that allow you to showcase your expertise and build relationships with prospective clients.
While these tips won’t address all the potential issues of growing your practice, they’ll be helpful. You may also wish to seek out mentors who started down this path before you. Also, consider attending Digital CPA training and the national DCPA Conference in December which provides educational and networking opportunities.
Edward D. Warren, MBA
Business Development Director
Ed is an accomplished sales executive with over 15 years of professional services sales and marketing experience. He’s worked for Allinial Global and RSM Alliance member firms and serves on the board of the Association of Accounting Marketing.
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