Outsourced Accounting Marketing – An Older Sole Practitioner

Acquiring $255k in 28 Months

In the fall of 2009, there was a CPA who attended our Accounting Marketing Workshop program and at the end of the day, he approached me about our Outsourced Marketing program but wanted to talk privately about his personal situation and explore the potential of engaging BYF to help him acquire $50k to $75k annually for three years. Well, this CPA ultimately enrolled and has acquired $255k in new business clients over 28 months and will ultimately acquire $325k at the end of three years.

Background on This Person

After everybody left our workshop, I sat down with this CPA to better understand his situation. His first question was about his age, and whether that would be an issue. He was quite concerned that his age would work against him and whether we would consider working with someone over sixty years of age (maybe older). I explained that his age did not concern me at all and was not a factor for participation in the outsourced marketing program. I did explain that we've declined engagements with prospects due to declining health and poor communication skills but he did not fit those situations.

The second concern that he had was if we had a concern about him building a book of business from scratch. Again, I explained that the size of his practice was not a concern and we had experience working with start-up CPA firms and established firms as well. The more important consideration was whether he could stick to a marketing system over the course of three years that would deliver small, simple service business clients to him and then he would follow the process for closing them.

The third concern was about his geographic marketing location, which was a very small city. It turns out that his market was relatively stable economically with a metropolitan population of just over 500,000 (slightly larger than Winston-Salem NC or Modesto Ca or Portland Maine). This was a challenge but we developed alternate strategies to overcome this issue.

Key Insights

To help this sole practitioner acquire higher quality clients, we focused heavily on service businesses like law firms, healthcare, information technology and various professional service firms. The CPA managed to close 50% of all leads (105 out of 212 leads) and the typical annual fee was $2,500 - $5,000. We avoided compliance oriented businesses (e.g., no reviews or audits) so the processing was relatively easy and peer review could be avoided.

At this point, the practice operates with two people and they will probably need to add a third staff accountant when the firm reaches $300k or $325k.

Overall, this accountant is thrilled with the progress and quality of the clientele. He is working hard but is really proud of the practice he's built in a short period of time.