Building my business back up

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.