Whewww! Doesn’t it feel good to have the busy tax season behind us? While not everybody in the freelance bookkeeping business does income taxes, I’m sure you’ve certainly felt the stress from your client’s anxiety at this time of year.
Since the first quarter’s business is finished, wouldn’t it be a good time to turn your attention to YOUR bottom line? Have you thought about how you can keep that steady stream of fresh business coming in?
Here are 3 steps to getting you on the right track:
- First you need to identify if you can handle more business. You might find that by reviewing what you’re already doing you can streamline your processes so that you can fit in more clients. If you personally can’t handle it but want your freelance bookkeeping business to grow, it might be a good idea to look into hiring some solid team members for your freelance bookkeeping business.
- As you review your client account, another thing to give attention to is whether you’re making sure to pay yourself enough. You can do this by calculating your true number of billable hours.
- Identify who you want to target in your marketing campaign. Marketing doesn’t have to be difficult. It can be as simple as sending postcards to new businesses and approaching CPAs.
To help you analyze whether you truly can handle more new clients, write on a calendar the name of each client, the frequency bookkeeping is performed and the amount of time needed. Then you can go through each client and ask yourself how you can provide quality services to the client and improve your bottom line. You may find it’s time to upgrade some to a new package, while others should be let go.
You know you put a lot of work into that business that you can’t bill the clients, for example, the time you spend marketing and doing your own bookkeeping. But those are necessary things for your business to run and you need to be paid to do them.
So you need to incorporate them into your billable hours. Once you figure out the billable hours, determine the dollar amount you want to pay yourself and divide it by the total number of billable hours. This is your new billable rate.
You can also find new clients by reviewing your current client roster and identifying which industry each client represents. Then identify the Power Partner for each client – a Power Partner is someone who plays with the people you want to do business with. Now all you have to do is contact the Power Partners, obtain referrals and schedule prospective client meetings. (To learn more about this strategy sign up for my free webinar, “Lead Generating Strategies that KEEP Your Pipeline Full” on the top right had corner of my website.)
Do these steps work? Yes! I shared these simple steps with one of my private coaching clients and just by following through with it, she brought in 5 new clients in one month and increased her revenue over $1000 per month. How cool is that?!! But the key is to keep taking progressive action.
Because I know this is an area that freelance bookkeeping businesses struggle with, I’ve put together a home study course “How to be a Marketing Pro When You’re Really a Bookkeeper!” It’s specifically designed for freelance bookkeepers and accounting professionals to get consistent and fantastic results from YOUR marketing strategies.
