Practice Development isn’t a single issue concept

A lot of fledgling accountants looking to start up in practice get in touch for help and advice and obviously I do my best to help wherever possible.

One of the topics I always bring up is practice development and I usually preface this with a question like “In a years time or maybe 18 months what do you think your practice will look like?, what sort of clients will you have? What sort of systems will you have in place?”

Why is this important? Well I point out that if you have no idea of the type of client’s you are looking for going in it’s highly unlikely that they are the client’s that you will attract. If you have not geared the systems you will be using to work with the clients that you are attracting then you are going to cause yourself a whole lot of work sorting out systems in a while that should have been avoided and will take you away from the actual fee earning work when you probably can least afford it.

Practice Development starts at the practice inception stage and carries on throughout your career in practice and the very first part of any practice inception is the decision as to the clients you want to attract.

Once you have this in mind then you can develop the website, the social media targeted output, the emails campaigns, the systems that you want to employ within the practice as well as for the clients themselves and the referral campaign as well.

Practice development is a whole practice wide encompassing expression it is not a single idea concept that can be thought up in an instant and turned on and off like a light unless of course you want to get it wrong.