How to Start your Bookkeeping Business – Part Two

Hope you enjoyed part one of How to Start your Bookkeeping Business, where we talked about conducting market research to find your competition, giving your business enough time to settle down, doing a bookkeeping course and getting certified, registering your business and creating your website. In this edition, we will discuss finding clients, positioning and marketing your business, amongst other things.  

How to Find Clients

One of the biggest concerns for any small business is whether they will find enough clients; whether they will be able to keep the business going? Even before optimizing your website to drive traffic, increasing your presence on social media or doing online ads, a great way to find clients is through networking. Start by asking friends and families for references. Reach out to personal contacts in person, via phone or email.

Prepare a short, simple pitch to send out to people. Keep it short, to the point: tell them about your business, how you can help them, and how they will benefit by using your services. Mention your phone number, website and social channels, if any, in all your communications. You can even offer a special price for first-time customers. Referrals, word-of-mouth advertising, is still one of the best ways to get business.  

How to Market/Promote Your Business

Every service and business is online today, so there’s no way of avoiding that. Google reviews, Facebook, LinkedIn, all play an essential part. Make your profile and start being visible on different platforms. Reach out to small businesses and even individuals to see if they are interested in your bookkeeping services.

But remember, in the online or real world, you shouldn’t always be promoting or talking only about your business. It’s all about what you can do for them?

You could do a mix of curated, educational and promotional content. Curated content is pointing people towards already existing content. This kind of content could be by thought leaders in the industry. Informative content is helpful content that may be useful for your target audience. This could include tips, cheat sheets, blogs, videos, or articles related to accounting or bookkeeping. For instance: how to get the maximum refund when filing your taxes; or one bookkeeping mistake that every small business makes.  

Building a network is an ongoing process. Even after you start getting clients, it is your responsibility to ask them to tell their contacts and network about your services, and to write you a testimonial on Google reviews.

Don’t Try Everything At Once

There are many ways to promote your business, and in your excitement, you may want to try everything at once. However, you may end up doing things for the sake of it, which could squeeze a lot out of you; they could even end up being ineffective. So focus on doing a few things and do them well.

For example, if you wish you start a blog series, decide how many will you write in a week or month, what will be the frequency, what will be the keywords you’ll be targeting, the platforms you will be promoting them on and so on. Start with something you can sustain over time and then scale up, not the other way around.

Positioning your business

Consider this: say a copywriter wants to get into freelancing. Will he/she get more hits when they brand themselves just as a copywriter or when they get more specific and say they are an “SEO copywriter” or a “medical copywriter”? The more focussed and specific your business is, the more chances there are of you garnering clients. Don’t call yourself something generic like “affordable bookkeeper,” but rather position yourself to stand out.

To identify your niche, ask yourself these questions:

Do you specialise in bookkeeping for a specific industry – start-ups or legal bookkeeper? Do you specialise in a particular bookkeeping software – Sage One, Xero, QuickBooks?

Do you bring more than one skill to the table? – a bookkeeper with technology skills (big data analysis, knowledge of business intelligence software, Microsoft Visual Basic, and so on).

Don’t Undersell Your Business

Sometimes, in the face of increasing competition or not having enough clients, you may be tempted to slash your prices. Sure, it may bring in some business, but you may also end up attracting bad clients who may drive you crazy. You could even end up driving away a few clients because they have perhaps automatically associated your cheap pricing with inferior service or skills.

Don’t confuse limited-time discounts or special pricing with this. You can undoubtedly run promotional offers to attract more clients, but don’t use this ploy so often that clients come to permanently expect you to give them discounts, or see you as someone so desperate for business that they stop respecting or valuing your services.

Starting your own business is challenging, but many in the past have done so successfully, and many continue to do so. If they can, so can you. Focus on one client at a time, treat each of them like they are the only client you have, consistently deliver quality service, and soon you will have built a successful bookkeeping company.