There are countless books available on growing your business, regardless of the industry that you are in. In our experience at Totus Finance, we have found that most are designed for small business owners to excel at leadership and management. We are yet to find a single book that tells us how small business owner needs to change their mindset as their business grows from 2 to 10 people.
In our business, we have grown from two to over two hundred people, and with it came a whole host of lessons. Lessons we wished we had known about in advance. So, this is what brought us here. This blog post shares how your mindset and leadership need to adapt as your accountancy firm grows from one to over one hundred people.
Be confident about your firm’s revenue
Whether one year ago or ten, think back to the early days of running your accountancy practice. When it was you and a trainee or administrator, your costs were probably low. Most of your time was acquiring clients or managing the client work you then had. Your role at this stage was to be the person that held everything together. You were the business, and if you did have team members, they tended to be low-cost and reported to you alone.
As soon as you go above three employees, and grow your accounting firm, your wage bill starts to become a significant part of your monthly costs, not to mention the higher level of responsibility. One of the reasons for creating Totus Finance was that in the early days of Llama Accounting, we, fortunately, found that the pipeline of work was exponential. The big peaks in workload meant that it was a no-brainer to take on more staff. Thanks to co-sourcing our accountancy firm with Causeway Connect, we no longer found ourselves hitting a revenue ceiling while saving up to 40% on recruitment costs. We needed to be confident that our revenue would hold up. Luckily being an accountancy firm, we have the luxury of clients who stay for years rather than months.
You need to become mentally tougher
Growing your accounting firm means employing people, and employing people means you are responsible for others. This responsibility goes so much further than paying individual wages. It extends to their livelihoods, happiness, development, and the quality of their work. It also means you are now in charge and need to be a great leader.
As you grow your accounting firm, you must provide for many more people. This means you must become mentally tougher. In our experience, most small accountancy firms have some early staff turnover. This early turnover may be because of poor recruitment decisions, or the firm outgrowing the first few hires’ competencies.
Very often in the early days, you must invest ahead to get the resource you need to fund your accountancy firm’s growth. At the point you invest you may not have the revenue to justify hiring another person. However, if you are going to grow your practice and preserve your sanity, you need to be able to do this. From our personal experience, this ‘investment’, takes mental toughness.
Learn from your mistakes
Ask anyone in business, and they’ll tell you that there has been plenty of mistakes learned along the way. Growing an accounting practice is no exception. There will be times when it gets too tough, and you’ll worry that you make the right choice. The most important thing to remember is where you’ve come from, and where you’re going. Don’t fall at the hurdle just because something went wrong. Keep pushing forward to reach those goals.
The fact is, you’ll cross this bridge 1000 times in your practice, but at least the more times you experience this, the more chance there is of you know how to fix these issues.
You need to establish systems and processes (and stick to them)
This year Llama Accounting increased its employee headcount more than any previous year since its establishment. Over the past year, we realized that our business needed newly established systems and processes. We could no longer rely on a weekly team meeting with everyone, but a daily morning meeting. We now talk about all things with all people. When we split down into our small operational units, it revealed our systems and processes. We quickly realized that we had to answer the following questions:
- Who is responsible for doing what?
- How is each team linked together?
- How did we keep each other informed going forward?
- How did we start to use technology to stop needing to take all our meeting time for updates?
Practice management becomes a priority not a nice-to-have
When it’s you and a couple of other team members, you are the linchpin. You normally know exactly what should be happening and by when. However, as you grow your accountancy practice, your headcount naturally creeps up. This means you can’t keep absolutely everything in your head anymore. You must trust others to get things done while considering recruitment costs. Naturally, you realize that you need to manage by exception. To do this you need to have a great CRM system in place, where with one glance you can see exactly what tasks are running late. And then, capacity planning, and finally work allocation. Who is going to do what, and by when? This is the essence of practice management. (And make sure that the business is running profitably, of course!)
Take the leap, and co-source your accountancy practice today
Since we at Llama Accounting, have co-sourced our bookkeeping and payroll with Causeway Connect, we have not only saved on recruitment costs, but have increased our revenue! Co-sourcing has allowed us to dedicate our time to growing our business while elevating stress. We have created Totus Finance for like-minded practice owners, who are ready to ‘take the leap’, and expand their business today.
For more information on Totus Finance, check out our ‘About Us’ page, or get in contact for a free, no-obligation quote today.
