In 2004, a Harvard sophomore launched a social media website that he originally intended to be a channel for people on campus to connect with each other. It was supposed to be like MySpace—an older, now defunct platform that allowed people to make connections—just on a smaller scale. However, when more people than anticipated signed up, Mark Zuckerberg quickly saw the opportunity for growth and ran with it.

Today, Facebook has more than two billion users online every day–and it’s only grown and adapted since then. Because of strategic planning and scaling, it’s been able to reach a worldwide audience, showing how important it is to adjust and tweak your business approach and your processes as you encounter more opportunities to grow and maintain that consistent growth. 

Scalability is crucial for businesses to stay relevant (unlike MySpace), to stay on top of trends and cater to an ever-changing market. Your target audience won’t be around forever, so adjusting your means, reach and methods are a necessity in the pursuit of success. When you scale your practice, you ensure you grow despite maintaining your level of work, avoiding the exhaustion of resources and manpower. 

Once you’re able to rake in more profit without having to adjust the means of making your accounting services work, you’re scaling your practice, making it easier for you to reach your business goals and succeed.

If you want to scale your practice, you need to devise the most efficient way to put together your service without spending more, keep your audience and their changing needs engaged and pay close attention to how you’re operating and earning. 

Signs it’s time to scale

It can be tricky to determine when your practice is ready for scaling–there are a lot of factors to consider. Even if you want to take that next step and find your footing for bigger projects and set your sights even higher, you need to be realistic with yourself and set processes in place to ensure everything is streamlined and ready for that kind of exponential growth. 

However, once you’ve put those systems in place and are noticing significant growth and efficiency, it may be time to consider your next big step into scaling. 

Here are some signs that your practice is ready to scale:

• You’re easily surpassing your previous goals – There will come a time when your goals will be very easily attainable. Your early goals may not be as big a challenge, nor will they put pressure on you as much as they used to. When you’re able to meet financial, organisational or staff-wide goals, and you’re finding achievable and repeatable success with those endeavours, you may want to consider taking the next step. 
• You notice little to no risk when forecasting your future expenses – When you start to make predictions around what you’ll need to spend on and you find yourself worrying less (or even not at all), you’re in a good spot. You might have a good amount to cover what you need to, and you don’t feel you’re going to be in the red with any sort of venture you plan to go on with your budget. 
• Your cash flow is strong and healthy – When you’re past the point of just earning back what you’re putting out and you have a strong reserve of cash that you can use to easily fund your future expenditures, it might be time to scale. Having that extra profit will give you a boost when it comes to unpredictable changes that you may not anticipate when it comes to shifting market demands. If a business move turns out to be risky, you still have a good amount of money to fall back on to attempt a new strategy.

Benefits of scaling an accounting practice

Scaling your practice is incredibly important as it opens it to new opportunities and comes with different benefits such as more publicity and a higher conversion rate. However, it doesn’t come without growing pains and roadblocks, so you need to be mindful of what you do and how they appear while you try to reap the benefits. 

Here are the upsides of business scalability.  

1. Revenue generation

When you cater to more clients, you earn more while expending more energy. However, when you grow your customer base while not having to adjust your means of production because you’ve found an efficient system, you’re profiting at an even higher rate. You have the same input while meeting more client expectations, getting more payments and fulfilling more invoices.

Operating cost remains relatively the same but you’re able to serve even more people. Performing well without having to expend more energy or spend more on more employees due to increased efficiency leads to more revenue down the road. 

2. Rising above competition

As elaborated in the last point, when your practice scales, you provide your accounting services to more people while still minimising operational costs. This gives you an edge over your competitors as it means you can serve more customers than they can, increasing your visibility in the industry and giving you a leg up in terms of client satisfaction.

Having more customers means you dominate more of the market, pushing you past competitors that may not be able to operate at the same capacity, rate or quality as you. 

3. Expanding your audience by meeting market demands

Scalability demands flexibility, this allows you better adapt to changing market demands and expectations. 

Your customer base won’t want the same thing forever and will turn to others in the industry to provide them with what they need. Once you’ve begun to scale and take on more clients, you also expand that audience by meeting those demands–all without having to make operation adjustments. 

You have to make sure you understand how your buyers think by adopting a sales mindset. When you’re able to think like your customers and fully grasp what they’re thinking of and what they want, you make insight-driven decisions that will push you to be open to reworking your processes or approach to sales. 

5 ways you can scale your accounting practice

Scaling your accounting practice comes with a lot of prerequisites. You need to make sure you have all these in place before you make any big moves towards any spikes in growth.

1. Streamline tasks and create standard operating procedures

If your staff is constantly asking you repetitive questions about how they have to do certain things, it may be time to set down some standard operating procedures and manuals they can follow so you don’t need to keep holding their hand through the onboarding process. 

This will help you eliminate those questions and empower them to find solutions at a quicker pace so they don’t have to wait for an email back from you first before acting. 

When you streamline tasks and give your staff something to refer to in case of any clarifications or questions, you hasten your production and maximise your productivity. 

2. Use automation and artificial intelligence

Automation can quicken processes and communication–for both customers and staff. When you install chatbots or databases that can answer quick, easily resolved questions, you don’t use up your or your staff’s time and energy, letting them focus on other things.

Manual data entry, especially in accounting practices, can be time-consuming and burnout-inducing as well. So finding an automatic data encoder (like timesheets) is crucial as you can replace the sluggish pace of manual entry with something quick. 

Automation is also less prone to error. Tasks that need precision like payroll, tax obligations, banking and audits will benefit from automation because any mistakes will be eliminated. 

3. Invest in your website and social channels

Making your social channels more attractive and professional-looking will draw in more potential customers, enabling you to grow your client base. 

When you streamline your brand and make everything look aesthetically pleasing, you gain your customers’ trust and stand out. Putting effort into your website and social media pages shows you’re doing your best to reach your customers, 

Good branding also makes you recognisable, making it easy for your customers to find you. Investing in SEO services and advertising also boosts your search engine rankings, putting you on top of Google results. 

4. Offer integrated, “all-in-one” services or packages

A one-stop shop is attractive to customers because they don’t have to look around any further for someone who can fulfill their other needs. When you only offer one type of specialisation, you’re holding yourself back from attracting customers who need more than one thing done for their practice. 

Making sure all of your employees are well-trained in different areas entices clients to make use of all your services, earning you more revenue. 

5. Take care of your people and company culture

Onboarding new employees takes a lot of time, energy and money so you need to make sure you retain them and show them you care about them. Replacing or losing your staff to competition constantly lowers morale and productivity, hampering your progress.

Once you’ve solidified your team culture and made concrete steps towards showing your team you value them, you strengthen their skills and their bond. Strong individual staff members are good, but if they can’t collaborate and work as a team because of weak company culture, their efforts will be disparate and confused. 

Successfully scaling your practice means retaining your employees and keeping their satisfaction top of mind. 

When it’s time to scale your practice, you want to ensure you’re ready and that everyone involved is ready to take on major changes. Just like how Facebook expanded from a Harvard-exclusive social media channel and entered into the global mainstream, you need to make big moves to broaden your client base without significantly increasing the amount of work it takes for turnaround. 

Scaling your practice will bring you more visibility, a healthier cash flow and more productivity, supercharging your success and strengthening your position in your industry.  If you want to learn more about how to make your practice stand above the rest of your competition by taking the next step towards exponential growth, give us a call.