Seven biggest challenges when growing your bookkeeping business - Challenge 1 - Marketing

There are a number of common challenges that you are likely to encounter when growing your bookkeeping business. So I’m going to tackle the biggest ones in a series of blogs over the coming weeks. The first challenge is Marketing. When Peter Cook and I run the Seven Secrets of Growing Your Bookkeeping Business Seminars I ask the question “Who loves marketing?” With over 1,000 bookkeepers having attended the Seminars I reckon about 1-2% put up their hand. So, although there are exceptions, it’s fair to say that the majority of bookkeepers find marketing a challenge. And I felt the same. In the early years of growing my bookkeeping business I knew that if I did a good job more clients would show up. To be honest, I would have preferred to pay someone else to do it so that I could focus on what I loved – the bookkeeping. Not only is that not realistic but Pete explained that my goals would take longer to achieve if I relied just on one marketing strategy. The trick was creating marketing systems.

With marketing systems in place I didn’t need to decide if I was going to do any marketing or not. I just followed the systems. Marketing systems not only removes some of the distractions that can take you away from marketing, it will help your business grow more predictably. With steady growth you’ll be able to fill your books quickly and plan the timing of engaging another bookkeeper, confident that you will be able to give them the work they need.

One of the traps though, is that you will want everything to be perfect before you start marketing and you’ll spend too much time developing the systems. Just be aware that, that just might be another excuse to avoid doing something you don’t like.

You may never love marketing but just do it anyway and you’re likely to discover the benefits are worth it.