Running a small business, or for that matter even a larger business in a time of crisis requires creativity and determination, and often help. When business is ebbing away due to your client base shrinking, you need to find new clients, which is not easy when businesses are in self protect mode. It may surprise people, but one source of potential business leads, could be your accountant. That would make him or her, your new best friend.
Regardless of which sets of numbers you believe, in relation to small business failure rates, it’s clear that starting a new business or running a smaller business is a tough job, even more so, given the way the pandemic has affected so many small businesses and dramatically changed many businesses landscapes.
These businesses need all the help they can get; but there’s one source of help that is often underestimated and under-utilised beyond their usual function, not so much from the perspective of the SME, but from the source itself, and that might surprise you!
No, not your dog, but your Accountant!
Boring? Don’t click away, they, ‘we’, may have a reputation of being perhaps somewhat introverted, poor communicators, tired and dusty, but we want to dispel that myth and show you how, as a small business owner / operator, you should be looking to your accountant for business introductions.
A social B2B broker
Did you realise that your accountant could become the centre of your networking world? Now there’s something to ponder! For that matter, how many accountants realise how much extra benefit they can add to their client’s business and growth opportunities, purely because of who they know and are connected to? There’s tremendous opportunity to be an effective business introducer, socially at a B2B level.
Many accountants talk about how they can help their client’s businesses grow. For the most part they are referring to the experience they have in identifying hurdles and obstacles to growth from a tax, cash flow or P&L basis. Often they are able to draw on experience from other businesses in similar markets or industries they have worked with over the years.
Smaller, more adaptive and eager for growth, just like our clients
However, the best way to help a business grow is to introduce it to potential clients. Some of the best accountants to do that are the ones that actually specialise in small business accounting. Why? Because they don’t have the luxury of sitting back and servicing large corporate clients where little ‘personal’ interaction actually takes place.
For smaller specialist accountants, survival is all about capitalising on offering services that focus on customer service excellence and introducing services that make the accounting process highly efficient, so more clients can be served without sacrificing service levels. In short, small business accountants have to be highly adaptive, creative and fast.
This is why so many offer ‘cloud-based’ accounting services, such as Xero, our particular favourite. It puts the business firmly in control of essential management data, allowing them to make faster decisions.
For accounting firms such as ourselves, it means we can service more smaller clients and still provide valuable business advice and expertise, maintaining that close personal relationship we’ve built our name around. It just makes sense to leverage this for greater benefit of our clients.
Your accountant as a novel networking opportunity
Let’s step back a moment, to the bit about introducing clients to other clients that may be potential customers. We’ve all been to networking events and know how potentially useful for new business opportunities that can be, but they can also be a terrible waste of time if they don’t quite turn out as expected. As a small business operator, it’s likely your accountant is sitting on a wealth of potential opportunity for you. It’s in their interest to put people together, to quote a well-used phrase in networking circles, it’s about ‘givers gain’. And these shouldn’t be just any old referral, the nature of the business means referrals between clients are always going to be qualified high-quality introductions.
Furthermore, your accountant is often very aware of the different issues small businesses face when trying to grow. Part of what we do at TaxAgility, is to help clients overcome obstacles. And we can do that because we have helped others through the same problems. The insight this affords us also means we can see potential synergies between small businesses, where growth in one may represent an opportunity for another, or indeed, where growth in one could be the catalyst another business needs for growth.
Small business accountants often have a wealth of diverse clients, the smaller accountants with a solid base of clients are also likely to be more ‘personable’, ‘outgoing’, ‘fun’, ‘interesting’, in short, real people you can relate to, and, wait for it, becomes friends and hang out with! All the essential qualities for a little business match-making. Novel really, when you think of the usual accountant stereotypes.
We like to think we are breaking the mould and reinventing the accounting practice by not only providing essential accounting, tax and bookkeeping services to our clients, but also by proactively making the appropriate introductions between clients that could do business together.
TaxAgility is London’s ‘local accountants’, serving small businesses, start-ups, contractors and individuals within the London area.
If you’d like to know more and let us become your best friend, call TaxAgility on 020 8108 0090