You can't build a £1m+ accounting firm on unpredictable growth.
Referrals. The occasional big win. A book of business. Then nothing for three months.
That might keep an accounting firm moving. It doesn't give you a predictable path to where you actually want to go.
Or read on to see how it works.
Growth like this is difficult to build around.
- Referrals
- Surge of new clients
- Capacity pressure
- Reactive hire
- Quiet month
- Take whatever comes in
- Another surge
Your revenue moves around. Your workload moves around. Your staffing moves around.
And eventually, you're running the firm around whatever happens to arrive.
The problem isn't that you're not growing. It's that you can't control the growth.
You can't reliably answer:
- How many new clients will we get next month?
- Which clients will they be?
- How much revenue will they add?
- Can we hire ahead of demand?
- Are we actually on track for the firm we want to build?
That makes everything downstream harder.
There is another way to grow.
Controlled. Steady. Predictable.
If you know you need 8 new clients a month, you can work backwards.
- 8new clients a month
- ~27qualified leads a month
- Predictable acquisition
- Planned onboarding
- Planned capacity
- Planned growth
Instead of hoping the next referral comes in.
How we get paid: 10% of the first-year fees we create.
No retainer. No set-up fee. Nothing paid upfront, and nothing paid on a promise of results.
We invoice as the fees come in, not before.
When a client the system brought you pays their monthly fee, we invoice 10% of it. A £200 a month client means £20 a month to us, for their first twelve months, and then nothing. If they leave early, the invoices stop. If the system brings you nobody, you never hear from our accounts department.
The one cost that isn't ours is ad spend, paid to the platform, from around £300 a month. That is the fuel the system runs on.
Who this is for. And who it isn't.
We turn firms away every week. That is what keeps the partnership working for the ones we take on.
A Growth Partner is
- An owner building a real business, with a target for where the firm should be in five years.
- Able to take on new clients now, a real number each month, not a hopeful one.
- Ready to grow capacity, or to replace lower-value clients with better ones as they arrive.
- Mostly referral-led today and tired of growth that arrives when it feels like it.
- Working mainly with business clients, and clear on the kind they want more of.
- Able to fund the ad spend, because our fee only arrives when the clients do.
This won't work if
- The firm is a well-paid job you are happy to keep at its current size.
- You are full, with no plan to hire or to let the wrong clients go.
- You would take any enquiry that lands, whoever it is.
- You want more marketing, but no target for what it should produce.
- Almost all of your work is self-assessment.
- There is no budget for ad spend, however well the system performs.
That's what we build with our Growth Partners.
We work with accounting firms that want to build predictable acquisition around a specific growth target.
- We map the numbers.
- Build the acquisition system.
- Generate the right opportunities.
- And take responsibility for the clients we generate.
You don't need to figure out what your marketing should look like. You need a system capable of producing the growth you're trying to build.
Think your firm could be a Growth Partner?
Apply to become a Growth PartnerTwo minutes. If there's a fit, you'll book a strategy call with Will.
“We wanted a partner who understood our sector, and they've delivered on that from day one.”
Niall O'Driscoll FCMA, OD AccountantsApply to become a Growth Partner
Tell us about your firm and where you want it to be in five years. Will reads every application himself.