How to Transition from Surviving to Thriving in your Bookkeeping Business
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Would you like a steady stream of new clients beating a path to your door?
Do you wish you could charge a higher fee for the services you provide and have your clients happily pay you?
If you answered yes to either one of these questions, it’s PEOPLE who will help you get what you want. You cannot get those results without other people!
More specifically, it’s the relationships that you build with people that will cause them to seek you out, value your services and recommend you to their friends and colleagues. Building relationships is how any struggling bookkeeping business can transition from just barely surviving (sometimes for years) into a thriving, growing, and prosperous business.
And the most effective way to build those kinds of relationships is by offering the VALUE that your existing and potential clients really want. And it needs to be value that they recognize immediately – not what they may, in fact, need, but don’t understand or see as valuable to themselves or their business in some way.
For example, they may truly need their bank accounts reconciled to assure accuracy for their financial records, but that is likely not high on their priority list of the important tasks to manage their business. So if you are touting how you can make sure that their bank account is balanced and reconciled each and every month, you’ll have difficulty attracting new clients, or demonstrate high value to your existing clients. Many small business owners don’t even know why it’s important to reconcile their bank accounts in the first place, so it doesn’t mean anything to them. Thus, it doesn’t seem necessary or important. And certainly not something they want to pay for if they don’t have to.
The same is true if you’re promoting your services using accounting and bookkeeping jargon – accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll liabilities, and so on. Potential clients generally do not actually understand those terms. Those words do not communicate value to them.
In reality, these words represent the functions you know how to handle for your clients. But they don’t communicate the useful value of those functions for your clients, value that your clients would be happy to hire you to provide for them.
So how do you provide VALUE that your clients will understand and readily pay you for?
Forget you are a bookkeeper! Put yourself in their shoes and consider what THEY care about. What do they spend most of their time doing in their business? What do they pay attention to on a daily basis and spend money on?
To answer these questions successfully, you need to get out of your own way and forget about what you want FROM your clients. You need to think about what they want most and how you can help them get it.
Relationships are built on exchanging VALUE. People value and are attracted to those who can help them reach their goals and fill their needs. As bookkeepers we are in a fantastic position to help our clients reach their business goals AND we can thrive in the process.
Learn the art of building relationships with your clients and prospects based on what is valuable to them, and you will not be viewed as “just another bookkeeper.” You will stand out from the crowd as a provider of REAL value. And THAT is what clients are happy to pay for because it means you are helping them get what they want. They will also talk about you to others, sparking the most powerful form of free advertising – word of mouth.
How can you learn to communicate value and build these kinds of relationships?
- Start asking your clients and other small business owners you meet what they want most in their business that they don’t have right now
- Pay attention to their answers and consider how the services you provide – and the information provided in financial reports – can be used to help business owners reach their goals
- Learn how to communicate the true value your services give to business owners in a language that they can easily understand
One of the best ways to learn more about what small business owners want AND stoke the fires of word-of-mouth recommendations is to build strategic alliances with CPAs and Accountants.
If you’d like to learn how to crack the code for building this special kind of referral relationship, join me and fellow CPA networking expert, Val Barshaw, this Wednesday for our live online training, “Freelance Bookkeeper Networking: How to Build Strategic Alliances with CPAs and Accountants”
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Recently one of your fellow readers submitted an excellent question about what we face as freelance bookkeepers when working virtually (from your own office rather than on-site in the client’s office)…
