Should acquiring new clients be your top priority?

If you want to grow your practice, acquiring new clients should NOT be your top priority. Sounds like a contradiction? But this may very well be the best strategy for growing your business. Here's why.

Let's ask ourselves, “Why do we want to get more clients?” The answer, obviously, is to grow our business. And why do we want to grow our business? Certainly not to get busier. It has to be for raising our bottom line. So, we have established that the ultimate goal of why we want to get more clients is to make more money and be more profitable.

The real issue then is: how can we raise our bottom line most effectively?

Getting new clients is certainly one of the ways, but there are many other ways we can raise the bottom-line, including:

– Getting more business from existing clients,
– Reducing overhead, and
– Increasing productivity.

There is one more thing that, although not as apparent, is most crucial for growing your business and increasing your profits-making your clients happier. That's got to be at the top of the list, because the client that you keep is always money in the bank while the client you try to acquire will at first cost you money.

What order would you rank the remaining items? Here is my pick for order of importance:

– Generating more business from existing clients. It requires some imagination and proactivity, but it is a goldmine hidden right under your desk.

– Increasing productivity and efficiency. Your time is money, and the less time you spend on any task, the more time you have to make more money. It's simple accounting you all know.

– Getting more clients. It should be the next step after you have made the most of the above two approaches, because it costs more than the other two, even if it's due to free client referrals.

– Reducing overhead. Don't confuse operating costs with overhead. Most accountants run their practice so barebones, they may need to increase their operating costs to raise their profit levels!

Please share your thoughts about this issue in our forum by clicking here. Do you agree or disagree? True, many of you have grown your business successfully by doing things in a different order, but do you believe this is the most effective way of skinning the cat or are there better approaches you can try? – Editor