Building my business back up

Dawny

Over the next couple of months I'm going to loose my main client, whom I've had for 10 years.

My 'bread and butter' client kept me busy for the majority of the week and other clients came through word of mouth, so I've never really had to get out and network before now. I'm thinking of looking for a job as it seems the easier thing to do but I'd much rather carry with my bookkeeping/accountancy businesses.

Does anyone have any advice?

Thank you.

topcat

Dawny wrote: »

Over the next couple of months I'm going to loose my main client, whom I've had for 10 years.

My 'bread and butter' client kept me busy for the majority of the week and other clients came through word of mouth, so I've never really had to get out and network before now. I'm thinking of looking for a job as it seems the easier thing to do but I'd much rather carry with my bookkeeping/accountancy businesses.

Does anyone have any advice?

Thank you.

Quick idea , maybe getting some good reference material of the 10 year client and use it in some marketing material ? Make a big deal of how many years experience you have

Set up social networking accounts if you have not already.

Advertise in the local paper maybe offer them a discount for first piece of work to hook them in ?

burg

I presume with this being your main income it is a mainly bookkeeping/management accountant type role. Whilst this type of income can be great this is the risk it presents. We don't do any bookkeeping per-se only a few small VAT Returns and some end of year tidying for accounts purposes. We lost our biggest client this time last year due to poor trading conditions in the building trade. A loss of about £4.5k plus VAT. Although it is a bit of a shock it was actually a good thing for us. We used the saved time to improve systems and see what we could do more efficiently.

Now we have about 200 clients so 1 client loss is relatively small however we are growing and are always looking for the right type of new business. If you look in the right places and do the right type of advertising it does work. We gain on average 4 new clients per month and have done for some while. There is always natural progression which may be closing businesses, those moving on, those going back to employment etc, etc. For this reason we find you need a certain amount each year particularly during a recession. This year we have gained 26 clients to the end of May. Only 8 have come from advertising with the rest from referrals. Our normal split is actually 65% from adverts 35% from referrals.

We pay for referrals from clients and have made more clients aware of this and that certainly seems to have helped from that perspective.

Don't give up as good growth can be done you just need a good plan and vision.

Dawny

Thank you for your thoughts, I have found them helpful and motivating, especially on a Monday morning!