by demonstrating your specialized expertise, you become their first choice.
by jody grunden
building the virtual cfo firm in the cloud
thought leadership is where you are really going to reap success. you want to be that person who everybody will come to.
more: riches in niches | 6 steps for sales and conversion | the right way to onboard new clients | 5 questions to evaluate new tech tools | the hidden cost of running a distributed company | how to develop your leadership team | automation and the future of accounting
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i just got off a call with a prospective client who had never met me or even seen me speak, but discovered us through a web search and saw that we are thought leaders in the industry. that discovery brought her directly to us, and it was important to her that the cfo she hires fully understands her industry.
there are a lot of firms out there that a business owner can reach out to for virtual cfo services or basic accounting and bookkeeping services. that’s why it’s important to differentiate yourself from the rest by becoming a specialist and thought leader within a specific industry.
once we did this, our business grew drastically. it’s been a fun ride going from a net worth of $500,000 to $5 million over the last 10 years. how did we do it? through solid forecasting, recurring revenue, maintaining high acquisition and retention rates, and by providing a tremendous amount of value for our clients.
it’s also important as an owner that you spend more time working on your business than you spend working in your business. you cannot be the most billable person in your company and expect to have time to scale your firm. in fact, you should be the least billable person in your company. you’ve got to create depth within your organization and make yourself replaceable.
if you really want to grow your business, you’ve got to step outside the traditional cpa firm model and adopt a corporate model with a c-level staff and leadership team. by doing this, you create a role for yourself where you can be the thought leader and actively work to grow your company.
in “good to great,” jim collins wrote, “in contrast to the good-to-great companies, which built deep and strong executive teams, many of the comparison companies followed a ‘genius with a thousand helpers’ model. in this model, the company is a platform for the talents of an extraordinary individual. in these cases, the towering genius, the primary driving force in the company’s success, is a great asset – as long as the genius sticks around. the geniuses seldom build great management teams, for the simple reason that they don’t need one, and often don’t want one. if you’re a genius, you don’t need a wells fargo-caliber management team of people who could run their own shows elsewhere. no, you just need an army of good soldiers who can implement your great ideas.”
i couldn’t agree with this more. personally, i don’t want my company to fail, and if it needs me, it will eventually fail. instead, i want to build a good-to-great, strong, healthy company that will thrive for years to come. and i hope you do, too!