I’m not one for picking on commenters who are kind enough to leave their thoughts here but I couldn’t let Ali Choudhury’s note on my Pizza Hut post pass without saying something. Ali says (and I’ll pick it apart):
To be honest, I don’t think clients are that hung up on getting the best possible service. If you get the compliance and planning stuff done fairly efficiently and can warn them against making fairly obvious mistakes, they stay happy enough.
That suggests to me there is little or no relationship between client and professional. If true then as a profession, we really are no better than a commodity to be picked from the phone book as occasion demands. If that is the ‘shape’ of most of your portfolio then perhaps it’s time to think about turning your practice into an accounting factory, taking advantage of all the technology available to make running the business as efficient as possible. I’ve seen it done successfully and while it is a valid business model I’m not sure it’s the kind of business I’d like to run.
They are adult enough to know that chartered accountants in practice are a busy lot.
That’s a defensive position and suggests clients won’t wish to ‘bother’ me. If true then I’d be very unhappy and want to know what it is I’m doing that prevents clients from wishing to contact me.
The biggest motivators for clients switching tend to be 1) price ; for smaller clients who can be serviced adequately by one-man bands,
This group of clients accounts for around 10-15% of many practice portfolios. These are usually the clients I don’t want unless I’m desperate. These are the clients who bitch and moan about everything, rarely if ever pay on time and cost more to service than they are worth in fee. There’s a choice here: bundles them up and sell as a block to someone better able to handle this group or put them into an accounting factory.
2) location ;
Location can be an issue but it depends on what the client wants and how they are serviced. Remote working and good broadband connections mean that it is possible to economically service clients who are geographically dispersed in ways that were not possible 10-15 years ago. You can for example think about conferencing clients into the office via VoIP services at very little or nil cost. For the adventurous, there is always video conferencing which is readily affordable. Many of my clients took a good hour to reach but that wasn’t an issue. After all, a run out from the office from time to time is hardly a hardship. Is it?
and 3) growth i.e. clients who have outgrown your firm and need advisers who are au fait with things like Finnish accounting standards.
This happens but is mostly avoidable. I am a great believer in alliances so for example we maintained relationships with firms that had specialized departments in areas like transfer pricing, insolvency and multi-national tax. That meant when we hit a brick wall, we had a peer group to whom we could turn for assistance. Most often, we’d end up retaining the client but there were always occasions when we could no longer service needs. In those circumstances, you’re always far better passing them on with good wishes and thanks for their years of loyalty rather than struggling on and worrying about potential PII issues.
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