Seven biggest challenges when growing your bookkeeping business – Challenge 4 – Recruiting

This is the fourth instalment in a series tackling some of the biggest challenges you are likely to encounter when growing your bookkeeping business.

The fourth challenge is Recruitment.

As your books begin to fill to overflowing you have two choices – grow or not to grow. That is the million dollar question. If you decide not to grow you can select your "A" clients, run a successful practice and say no to any new business. And there’s nothing wrong with that choice. But if you have a bigger vision and want to grow your business so that you can empower more business owners than you can do on your own, you need to recruit.

But it’s not that simple. We speak to many bookkeepers who have decided not to grow beyond a practice because they’re scared to recruit. We often hear bookkeepers say that they’ve cleaned up messes left behind by bad bookkeepers and don’t trust anyone else to look after their clients. You may have tried recruiting before and it was a disaster because you didn’t test them before you placed them with a client.

When I first starting recruiting I was hopeless at it. Which is understandable because I was a bookkeeper, not an HR specialist. I had no way of testing the applicant and my interview techniques were more of a “chat” over coffee. I made costly and excruciating mistakes time after time. I lost clients who had lost faith in me and I lost heart. Believe me, I know how scary the recruitment process is.

Unless you want to grow a world of pain you need effective systems for every step of the recruitment process – from placing the ad through to assessing resumes, calling the applicants, testing, interviewing, inducting and training in your bookkeeping processes and managing the relationships with your precious clients.

My advice to help you avoid the pain I went through growing my business is don’t start recruiting unless you have reliable recruitment systems in place.