Who calls first
Contact outside the filing window, and who starts it. An owner who only hears from their accountant when a signature is needed knows the answer immediately.
Accountancy practices
Score the incumbent, not the prospect
Growth in an owner-managed practice comes from switchers. A switcher has no way to judge whether the accountant they already have is any good, so they stay where they are. The thing standing between you and their fee is not your reputation. It is that nobody has ever given them a yardstick.
Not open yet. Ours scores your own marketing rather than a client’s books, and it is the quickest way to see one of these from the other side of the screen.
The mechanic
The questions are about the accountant they already pay. Almost nobody has ever asked them that.
You already know what a good adviser does for a client. The owner filling this in does not, and every question hands them one more thing they are not getting. By the last one they have made the case for moving without you making it for them.
Where the work comes from now
Referral built the practice and it will not build the next 30 clients
Word of mouth reaches owners who were already told to call you. The site reaches everybody else, and at the moment it reaches them with a guide and a contact form.
What referral does well
It arrives pre-sold, it closes quickly and it costs nothing. No page on a website will beat it and this one is not trying to.
What it cannot do
It cannot be turned up. The number of owners who know one of your clients is fixed this year, and the ones who do not know any are the entire growth plan.
So the practice writes content. It gets read, it ranks eventually, and it converts almost nobody. A business owner reads 2,000 words about changing accountants and then meets a contact form. That hands them the work and no reason to do it.
The same traffic, asked a question about themselves, behaves completely differently. Nobody fills in a form to find out what you do. They will answer nine questions to find out what they are already paying for.
How qualifying happens today
The first meeting is where you find out, and you have already paid for it
An hour of a partner’s time, the preparation before it and the write-up after, spent before anybody knows whether this owner was ever going to move.
94%
Which means the meeting is not where the decision gets made.
By the time an owner is sitting across from you, they have mostly decided. What the free hour buys you is a chance to confirm a ranking that happened weeks earlier, on a screen, without you. The useful question is what they meet at that point.
What we would build
Is your accountant actually earning their fee?
Nine questions about the relationship the owner is already in, scored on the six things that separate a practice worth paying from one that files on time.
Tax planning, or filing
Whether anybody has raised a structural question in the last two years, or whether the work stops at getting the return in on time.
When the numbers arrive
How long after a month end the management accounts land, and whether anybody talks the owner through them.
Whether they know the trade
Sector knowledge is the single easiest thing for a specialist practice to win on and the hardest thing for a general practice to claim.
What the software does
Bank feeds, receipt capture, payroll, the bits the client still rekeys by hand. Every manual step is an hour somebody is paying for twice.
What the fee covers
Whether the owner can say what is in scope. Most cannot, and finding that out on their own screen is more persuasive than any fee comparison you could send them.
Six factors, weighted, because they are not worth the same. Late management accounts annoy an owner. Two years without a single structural conversation costs them money, and the score has to say so.
What they walk away with
A verdict on the relationship they have, and a checklist for changing it
The result is the thing they forward to whoever else signs the cheque. It has to survive being read by a spouse, a co-director and, occasionally, the accountant it is about.
yourpractice.co.uk/fee-check, question 4
Question 4 of 9
About 90 seconds left
When did anybody last raise a tax question you had not asked about?
yourpractice.co.uk/fee-check/result
41of 100
Filing, not advising
You are paying an advisory fee for a compliance service.
Your answers put the relationship in the bottom band on four of the six factors. Three of them are fixable by asking, and one of them is not.
- Working
Deadlines. Nothing has been filed late, and that is worth keeping.
- Costing you
No structural tax conversation in two years, on a business that has doubled.
- Next
Ask for a planning meeting before your year end. If it does not happen, the checklist below is the move.
Sample screens. The question, the answers, the score and the breakdown are written to show what the components hold. Nothing here is a real result and no practice is described.
Notice what the low band does not do. It does not tell the owner to panic and it does not sell your practice in the second paragraph. It tells them the one thing they can fix without moving, because a report that only works as a sales letter gets read as one.
Who reaches your diary
Three outcomes, and all three are worth something
A score is only worth building if it changes who gets called. Here is exactly what it changes.
Before
A guide about changing accountants, a contact form, and an owner who reads it and stays where they are.
Nothing was learned about them, and nothing was learned about you.
After
A verdict on the relationship they are already in, a switching checklist, and 9 answers sitting in your CRM before anyone books anything.
The ones who score their current practice badly are the ones worth an hour.
Scores their current practice badly
This is the switcher. The report names what they are not getting, in the order it costs them, and the diary opens on the same screen. Your first meeting starts from six things you already know about their year end, their software and their fee.
Scores it in the middle
Unhappy on two points out of six, which is not yet a decision. They go into follow-up written against the two, not a newsletter, and they come back at the point in the year when moving is actually possible.
Scores it well
They are well served and they now know it. That is worth having. The report ends by asking who they know who is not, and a recommendation from a happy owner beats anything you could have sent.
Your client managers stop spending the first twenty minutes working out what sort of business they are sitting with.
Where the traffic comes from
This sits behind the two channels a practice already uses
Not a new spend. The same visitors, meeting something they will actually finish.
Channel
Search
Owners search for their own situation, not for a practice. “Changing accountants”, “what should my accountant be doing”, “accountant for builders”. Every one of those is somebody mid-decision, and every one of them currently lands on an article.
Channel
Content and webinars
The material the practice already writes gets a purpose. A guide that ends in a score collects nine answers. The same guide with a download button collects an email address and tells you nothing about who left it.
Both of them are already being paid for, in hours if not in media. What changes is what the visitor meets at the end.
What it takes
Three packages, fixed scope, and one decision that is yours
The scoring model is the part that cannot be outsourced, because it is a written definition of the client you want more of.
Somebody in the practice has to say which enquiries are worth a partner’s hour. Turnover band, sector, software, how much advisory work is realistically there. We draft that as one page, you argue with it, and nothing gets designed until it is signed.
The prices are not published yet because they are not final. When they are, they go on the packages page in numbers rather than in a form.
Questions
What practice owners ask before they commit to this
Referral brings you people who were already told to call you, and it is the best lead a practice gets. It also caps how fast you can grow, because it only reaches the owners who happen to know one of your clients. This reaches the ones nobody told, at the moment they are privately wondering whether they are being looked after.
Your turn
The quickest way to judge this is to be the one answering the questions
Ours scores your practice’s own marketing on the four things that decide whether the people reading your site ever become clients. The report names the one costing you the most, and it is yours whether or not we ever speak.
Not open yet. When it opens, all you need to hand is roughly what the practice spends on getting found each month.