Whether you’re a new accountancy firm, or a well-established business looking to the future, business development is vital to ensure that you continue to grow and thrive. However, what is business development, and what are some simple steps you can take to ensure you’re getting it right? In this article, we’ll go over our top business development tips for accountancy firms.
What is Business Development?
First, what exactly is business development? It’s quite likely that you’ve heard this term used, but it can be challenging to pin down a definition for it. However, business development is simply all about ensuring long-term value for your company.
Rather than just focusing on the next month or two, business development is all about ensuring growth in the future and in years to come. Small changes now really can have this big an effect on how successful your company is. This includes looking at how your company works, what processes you follow, and making sure that you catch the attention of potential customers. Let’s look at some tips.
1. Sort Out Financing
Whatever stage your accountancy firm is in, you need to make sure that you have sufficient financing for your next steps. It’s always worth making sure that you have some easily accessible funding available to help you get started with business development strategies without having to wait for a loan to be approved. Capital on Tap offers business credit cards for accountants that will give you, your employees and your clients easy access to funds when you need them. Of course, there are also other funding options. The main thing is to ensure that you have funding readily available to use, as this helps ensure that you don’t waste time waiting when you could be implementing strategies to advance your firm.
“Business credit cards don’t just help by replacing petty cash purchases or avoiding the hassle of reimbursement paperwork. Credit cards can be an essential form of funding that’s ready when you need it, with high enough limits to let you start ambitious projects of growth and redevelopment in your firm.”
– David Luck, co-founder and CEO of Capital on Tap
2. Track Your Data for Success
It’s vitally important to make sure that you keep track of how business is progressing in your firm. You need to have robust measures for logging hours, clients, income, and outgoings. All of this will help you keep an eye on important metrics like cash flow, which will help you highlight areas of significant growth, as well as identify problem sectors that you may need to focus on.
3. Improve Your Marketing
Modern marketing is evolving all the time, and you need to make sure that you stay ahead of the curve to attract clients. This includes ensuring that you have a fast and effective website as well as making the most of social media advertising. Of course, you’ll also need to keep abreast of new trends and make sure that you always have something interesting to offer your customers, to get them paying attention to your campaigns.
4. Improve Workflow and Utilize Automation
One of the big ways to ensure your business is developing on the right path is to look at improving workflow and automation. This means developing processes that save your employees time, which means everything from handling petty cash purchases quickly to making sure that paperwork and logging are smooth. Also, try to make sure that meetings aren’t overly long, nor too brief to actually help anyone.
David Luck goes on to say: “Business credit cards give your employees immediate access to company funds that helps simplify your processes and saves precious admin time. Certain cards provide valuable tools that make tracking expenses easy and transparent.”
5. Focus on both New and Existing Customers
Many firms think that focusing solely on new customers is the key to growth, but it’s your existing customers that will actually help make sure that your firm is profitable for years to come. It’s important to focus on customer retention strategies to make sure your client base stays loyal. Of course, you’ll want to still attract new customers too.
6. Make Sure Your Team is Improving their Skills
Business development is all about future growth, so you need to make sure your team grows too. Investing in additional training and upskilling can help make sure that your business stays ahead with engaged and productive employees. This could encompass anything from additional accountancy qualifications to tech training, or team building.
Business development helps make sure your firm builds value for the future, so it’s important to put strategies into place. This means arranging funding and training to make sure all staff can optimize productivity, as well as attract customers and build a loyal client base.
