Tips to turn your financial consulting firm a big brand

You’ll agree that to start up a professional financial services firm you need to have very good knowledge of business. You have to think about and manage lots of things like capital, profit margins, target audience, sales channels, and recruitment of qualified resources. Almost all of the businesses do the same thing, find solutions to these problems and start doing business. A question arises here that how can you sell your services without being trusted? And how people can trust you without a brand recognition?

Branding is the subject of the business that most of the business owners often ignore or don’t pay as much attention as the subject deserves. As a result, they used to fail to acquire a solid position and value in the market.

The following tips may help you to create a better brand recognition of your financial consulting firm in the industry. 

• Know well your strengths: In the financial services industry, you have to make your firm expert in any particular area, means you have to select any niche and to get excel in that. Without knowing what you are expert at, it is hard to convince the clients to hire your services. You have to know about your strengths and major proficiencies. Without the message of why to choose you, you will hardly get clients confidence. Plus, here one thing is important to remember that don’t claim that you can’t pursue. 
• Focus on ‘best’ instead of ‘more’: Like every business you’ll find it tempting to serve more and more customers and generate revenue; what will happen in the end that in the hunt of more you couldn’t focus on quality of services and will disappoint many clients that is not good for your brand image. Try to be a more reliable and highly personalized financial consulting providing firm. Then see the number of clients you’ll get through referrals when people would talk about your brand’s excellent services.
• Turn your clients into your fans: Branding is not just about an artistic logo or an appealing slogan. It’s more about to give your clients such a confidence and trust that will make them your fans. In the professional financial services industry, nothing will pay you but the comfort level and personalized services you give them. People would love to talk about brand with their friends and coworkers and would like to return to you again if they can relate you at a deeper level. Loyalty programs, social media shares, and events etc can help you to engage your clients and to make them feel that they a part of your organization.

Tips for your CPA firm to sustain through current economic situations

Yes, economic situations are tough, but think the other way, it is the best time to boost up your CPA firm. You know what every trouble carries opportunities in it. This time allows you to strive for finding the new business leads, and to connect with more new customers. Offering something extra and providing the services on merit will not only build your customer base but it can also increase it.

You’ll agree that your best clients were sent through the word of mouth referral and the recession time gives you an opportunity to work for the best clients instead of finding the new clients for your accounting firm. Offer them highly personalized services and soon you’ll see that your customers would love to talk about your excellent services with their friends, coworkers and business contacts.

Before the beginning of busy tax season, it is suggested to plan 4^th quarter tax session with your clients, and the most important thing for a successful tax planning is money. Giving them hope is which will give your CPA firm a competitive advantage. During the meeting you should give them hope and confidence. Remember if you succeeded to take them out of stress, think you have won their trust and this will make them dependent on your firm.

Executing an effective tax planning is not just about minimize the amount of tax the client has to pay, in fact besides the managing cash flow and investing you have to remove anxiety and keep them relaxed, as the recession has affected every body professionally and personally. Particularly the responsibilities of parenthood are getting terrible. So for your clients with kids you have to do something extra before just file return.

You have to make them sure that whatever will be situations you’ll be able to cope with them. Managing fear, overcome negativity and reducing stress are the true outcomes of a successful planning session that will be added to your company profile. Further you also have to be a good listener to your clients. Listen to them and talk about their concerns about the current economic situations. You don’t need to sound too optimistic or you will not look like real because your clients are not thinking positively. Once you have run a successful planning session, just see the number of clients you would get through referrals that is the best proven way to stand your CPA firm out in the competition.

Remember recession has increased anxiety and uncertainty. Your leadership should have to make your clients strong and optimistic from inside and you have to do more than just filing a tax return.

Integration of web technology to your CPA firm to enhance work efficiency

By the time, the economic scene has become tough and with the rapid advancements in information technology, the CPA firms are more inclined to use the experience of well qualified web designers in to their website to fuel up their promotional campaigns. But not only in the business promotion, a well designed and customized website also helps you in reducing business expenditures and to simplify various business operations that are really costly if performed using traditional methods.

• Reduce tax forms and publications costs:  One of the biggest advantages of the information technology is that it has reduced the costs of paper and so the labor and time to manage it. Creating a website for your accounting firm allows your clients to download tax forms and other publications. Earlier it was quite an expensive task to send tax forms and other data to clients through mail service that used to consume more effort and time.

• Online tax organizers have made life easier:  It was really very costly to afford every tax season. It used to double the man hours and costs in printing and postage. This costs hundreds of dollars, depending on your clients’ size. Integrate a PDF document center to your website and the clients can download and print it from anywhere securely. Lots of advanced CPA firms websites have published their tax forms online, and that can be downloaded securely through the website.

• Simple and secure file transfer: It so happens that clients used to delay sending their documents even after the last date of sending you don’t receive complete documents from them that is so annoying for you, whereas with the use of advanced web technology, your accounting firm website may include a user friendly and secure file transfer function that allows clients to send their confidential documents safely and speedily that surely save their postal service charges.

• Send E-newsletters: Modernize the way you send newsletters to your clients, and get out of sending newsletter through the conventional mail service. It takes a huge investment in printing, postage and envelopes when newsletters were sent through traditional mail service. Plus, you can’t calculate the efforts, time and human resources it used to take. A well developed accounting firm website facilities to send quick newsletter to thousands of clients in just few mouse clicks using friendly interfaces. Plus, it also allows you to enhance your mailing list in an economical way, and this even brings more potential clients to your business. 

Why should your small business advisory firm need to update your blog regularly?

Most of the small business advisory firms, irrespective of their size and scale realize the importance of presence of their firm on the internet. For this they develop an official website displaying their mission statement, services, achievements, list of satisfied clients and lots of other things. They manage their presence on social media as well, making daily updates and sharing stories about their new products. They also maintains a blog where it shows a couple of posts and then months pass by, no new content is posted. Such thing is enough to distort your professional value in front of potential clients.

Yes, setting up a blog, link it with your small business consulting website, and keep posting there regularly is not an easy task and requires a lot of time and efforts. So think twice before setting up a blog and linking it to your website, and when you decide to set up a blog for your small business advisory firm, make sure you have something to share and you keep it updated. Just suppose a likely client checking out your website and then he lands to your blog through the website and sees that the last post you published 5 months ago, it won’t create a good impression on them.

But if you set up a blog and keep it updated, in the long run it would be very beneficial and useful for your small business consulting firm. First, major search engines like Google used to show content from blogs that are updated with informative and fresh content. So if you post after every two days or weekly, even if it’s a short post, that will ensure more visitors to your website, and as you’ll be found on the search engines, it will send more potential clients to your business.

You running a consulting firm, means you are expert of your field. Writing about your experiences, sharing success stories, achievements will enable you to talk about your expertise and make you an authority in your community. Talking to the commenters, answering to their queries, advising them will of course strengthen your network.

Plus the good news is that if you didn’t secured A+ grade in writing, it doesn’t mean you can’t write a blog. As long as you can take out sometime in every week, you can write for your blog very easily and enjoy the positive results.

Financial services industry can do a big business in developing countries

It is being said that a country that has nothing in it, it has opportunities, yes, the saying is absolutely true, since such a country which is far behind economically, lack capital, with poor infrastructure and technical facilities, such destination is a big business market. It is full of opportunities to do lots of things there. Since such country has nothing that’s why it has ‘demand’ of what it doesn’t have, it has potential labor to be trained.

Often it happen that financial services industry and other big investors are hesitant to give their capital in such markets out of fear of failure. It is observed such countries are a lucrative market for the agricultural sectors, but lack of organization and knowledge in local farmers, poor transportation system and sometimes unfavorable weather conditions are some of the challenges that make accounting services industry and investing companies face that result in increased gap between supplier and buyer that make them reluctant to invest and find new potential markets in such developing countries.

The need in fact is to bring together and keep discipline in all the activities throughout the process and to keep the market active. The good thing is that there are some organizations and business corporations in the financial services industry that act as a catalyst to the process and fill the gaps where necessary in the process. They offer extensive knowledge, training, incentives, loans and of course capital to stimulate the market and help investors in finding new sources of supply. The also act as a bridge builder and fill the communication gaps between the stake holders and other participants of the process that include financial institutions like banks, investors, manufacturers, suppliers, distributors and end users to keep the business process under control and keep the market in motion.

Such efforts and enterprises not only help in reduction the risk of failure of investment in developing countries but also help such developing countries to get out of the poverty. The endeavors also produce profits worth the investment for all the players of the game and encourage other multinational and other larger companies to try their luck in such developing markets.

In this concern multiple businesses set up joint ventures that also worked well in such developing countries. Such various business partnerships got together in some African countries like Uganda and Kenya. The partnership aimed to bring better markets for mango and other fruits farmers and to increase incomes for more than 50,000 local farmers. Through the partnership, they are training the farmers to improve their yields quality and quantity.