With existing clients mothballing or sadly closing entirely, practices need to be slick at launching new services and gaining new clients. 

Sadly large number of accountants are now being furloughed, while many smaller practitioners face a dramatic loss of business.

For accountants and other professionals looking to use the time at home productively,  our webinar yesterday specifically looked at how people at home could use this to build their reputation for expertise.

2020 could not be worse for many accountancy and tax practices.

Swathes of businesses across travel, hospitality, creative, entertainment and non-food retail face an immediate existential threat. If it’s bad for them, it's going to be really bad too for those practices with lots of these clients.

Sadly many accountants and their support teams are being furloughed through the Covid-19 crisis hitting all manners of professions and sectors.

Our forthcoming webinar is for those who want to use this time productively to develop their reputation for expertise, whether simply amongst their colleagues for their return to work, within their business network or even more widely in their industry.

We recently held a webinar on "Successful blogging for accountancy firms" with accountancy outsourcers Initor Global'.

At one level, successful blogging is surprisingly simple!  You just follow these 6 straightforward stages:

The key steps for success with your accountancy firm's blogging are:

1. Ensure the quality and relevance of the blog to your target reader
2. Blog regularly (firms that blog once or twice a week get dramatically more leads than those who do it only once or twice a month)

Webinar: Successful blogging for accountancy firms

Posting interesting blogs regularly on your website is an effective and straight-forward way for accountancy firms of all sizes to attract leads.

Straight-forward, but often difficult for many to sustain, with common problems including:

- Getting stuck for ideas
- Writers-block when it is time to draft 
- Making the process unnecessarily time-consuming

- Shallow content that does not engage readers

If your accountancy practice does not appear prominently on Google when business owners are searching online for advice, you are missing out on one of the largest sources of leads for accountancy firms.

The good news is that most accountancy firms don't have to apply complex secret techy techniques to dramatically improve their search engine rankings.  

In fact, topping Google can often be achieved primarily through applying straightforward rules and a bit of thought to the text and other content on your own web pages and social media.

Many accountancy firms fail to appear in one of the most effective sources of new leads when prospects are searching.... the first page of Google.

While many have put in the effort and generate a regular flow of suitable leads, many other practices either fail to make it a priority or are in denial about its benefits (which of course becomes a self-fulling prophecy).   

Not sure where your practice appears?  

Simply open up a browser and type in the sort of search a potential client would make (NB - not your firm's name!  Also, best done from a private browser window to stop your results being skewed by your browsing history).

The "Big Four" oligopoly of giant accountancy firms is again lobbying hard to protect its position and prevent some sort of break-up restoring a nearly-as-Big Five or maybe six.

Their past efforts have been successful, and their new impetus follows damning comments from leading MPs on the various Parliamentary committees investigating the collapse of Carillion and the role of the Big Four firms. Their ire is particularly high as the Big Four billed Carillion, its pension schemes and the Government £71 million since 2008 relating to Carillion: yet failed to notice anything was wrong.

Grow your practice in 2018 with great advice from our seminars for accountancy firms

Kelso Consulting once again has a series of our popular seminars and webinars for accountancy firms in the first half of 2018, covering a range of business development issues, including public relations, social media, online ads and thought leadership. 

We'd like to invite you and your colleagues to attend!

Particular aimed at accountancy firm partners, together with their marketing directors, we will be hosting our seminars in London and, for Thames Valley businesses, in Newbury.

We are back for a busy autumn with plenty of business available to be won - but lots of accountancy firms after it and strong pressure on fees.

It is those firms that are distinctive and memorable that get recommended for the best appointments.  Those demonstrating distinctive expertise can charge more than their rivals and still win the work.

How do accountancy firms get into such a great position of being recognised as having distinctive expertise?

Of course this is a rhetorical question.

We all know that it's easier to sell clothes where there are crowds of people shopping for them.  If only there was an Oxford Street where prospective clients go to buy accountancy services.

Webinar: Successful thought leadership for accountants 

Accountancy firms are ideally placed to utilise "thought leadership" to create the sort of ideas that will grab the attention of clients.

They have great analytical skills, a strategic perspective and can translate ideas into tangible activity. Indeed many firms have been using it successfully for many years - for instance, Deloitte's hugely successful 'Annual review of Football Finance' has been going for nearly 25 years.