How To Get Clients

So how WILL you get new clients?

First of all, if you don't have any clients yet then your full time job is getting new clients.

Word of Mouth

Let's say you're a new accounting or bookkeeping professional out on your own just starting your new business.

The first thing you'll want to do is start telling everyone you know that you are starting your own accounting or bookkeeping practice. Then ask people if they know anyone who might need help. Notice what I said. You don't ask people if THEY need help. You ask them if they know anyone who needs help. That includes them, but it's not limited to them, so now you've got them thinking. And even if they don't know of anyone the moment, you've planted the seed for them to think of you the next time they are talking to someone who might mention in passing that they need some accounting help.

And so begins the referral part of your marketing strategy. You can offer incentives too, like pay people 20% of the fees for the first year for anyone they refer. There are many tools out there that will help you track this, but as long as you are starting out and probably bootstrapping a bit, use a good old fashioned spreadsheet.

Social Media

This is obviously a big area to cover so for this purpose I am going to keep this fairly high level.

The quick and short answer is get out there. Get a LinkedIn account, Facebook page, and an Instagram account set up in that order. Start writing. Open up Chrome and type Docs.new in your browser and just write about the accounting subjects that you are passionate about. Write about your favorite QuickBooks Online feature, report, or whatever it is that you think is going to get people excited about their accounting.

Start making connections. Use the search. You should spend an hour a day (more if you don't have any clients yet) on LinkedIn.

When you send a connection request, send an authentic message letting them know why you want to connect. Keep it short and sweet, and most importantly keep it real.

Keep track of your connections in some kind of CRM. I can show you how to do this really well using ClickUp.