How to Grow CA, CS, CMA Firm Practice from 20 to 200 Clients

Dear professional friends, In our earlier article we had discussed how to get the first set of 20 clients for CA CS CMA and lawyers who have just started their practice, link to the article is given here if you have not read it.

After releasing this article, it got tremendous response and we got various requests, asking us to write an article on the topic, how to take your practice from 20 clients to 200 clients. Here basically, what they are asking is, how to scale the practice.

You need different types of methods, skills, and thought processes to establish and start a new practice and different methods, skills, and mindsets to scale an existing practice. Scaling a practice is a problem which most professionals struggle with.

You may know many senior Chartered Accountants who are busy totally but don't earn enough. Basically, they have not been able to scale their business.

It may be easy to get clients but once the practice gets bigger and bigger, it is not easy to manage it and that is why people struggle with scaling the practice. Basically scaling means managing the bigger practices and serving more clients without affecting the quality of service.

So we are excited to present this article to you where we will tell how to transform your practice from 20 to 200 clients. Are you Excited to learn the ideas?

Friends before moving ahead don't forget to follow our LinkedIn page, if you are interested to update your skills so that you are less stressed and more profitable in your practice.

For scaling anything, there has to be leverage or a multiplying factor. In a CA practice, this leverage or multiplying factor can either be knowledge or people.

CA practice is a service that is totally dependent on people and their knowledge levels so either you can increase the number of people working for you or you can keep a small team but increase their knowledge levels.

So there are two leverages - people and their knowledge. In this article, we will understand what are the pros and cons of these two methods of scaling the practice and which one you should select for your practice.

Read this article till the end to know which leverage is Apt for your nature and skillsets. Since you have come here it is clear that you are eager to learn skills and methods to grow your practice and you will stay till the end of the article.

We will start first with the knowledge form of leverage. there are many Chartered Accountants who have no people management skills but they are experts of their subject matter.

Such Professionals should choose the knowledge leverage to scale their practice. when you are young and less experienced your per hour rate of remuneration is very low as your knowledge is limited and you contribute less to clients. When you start gaining more and more knowledge, you can add more value to clients' business and now clients are ready to pay a bigger rate per hour for your services.

So to get more profits, you go on increasing your knowledge so that you get more and more rate per hour for yourself. You need not have a bigger team, need not have bigger offices and bigger establishment expenses.

You may be knowing many lawyers who charge a bomb for even one hour of their presence in a meeting. In movies, you may have even seen a small clock kept on the table of the lawyer counting every minute in the meeting.

Here in this form of leverage, you have a small team, small office to manage. It is a benefit of this leverage.

But there are many cons of this method. Here you are like a celebrity who is getting a lot of price for their presence at the place but the day, they stop working their total price comes to zero. So as you grow old once you reduce your number of working hours, even if your price is higher per hour, the total remuneration that you will get will go on reducing.

This is a method which requires you to be present and working always. also in this method, the transferability of business is very difficult. Can a lawyer just transfer his knowledge and experience to his son?

Knowledge is very difficult to transfer to other people. So once you stop, your practice stops.

Now let's see how people form of leverage can be used in a CA CS or CMA practice.

In this method, you go on increasing your team. you start with two people then you increase the team to 20 and ultimately to 200 people.

Here you will have to build a lot of people management skills. here, you need just a basic level of knowledge and you need to train people for it and since it is basic knowledge it can be standardized and people can be trained for that limited knowledge. As your team grows you can serve more and more clients and your profits go on increasing.

But the negative point here is your practice is now dependent on other people and their mood swings and motivation. if you are not good at handling people you won't be able to manage more number of people.

The positive point here is that you are not required to be present in your practice all the time. Even if you are not working your people will work for you they will earn profits for you. Such kind of practice is easily transferable to the next generation as it can be standardized easily.

Now that you understand the 2 kinds of leverages, you will have to study what kind of practitioner you are. you are better at working alone or you are better at working with the team. You would like to manage your knowledge and get an expert in a subject matter or you would like to work with and manage more people.

Once you decide on your leverage you can start building your practice in that direction and if you'll give enough number of years in a particular method, the practice will grow.

There are many Chartered Accountants who don't have a definite plan in which direction they want to go and that is why they cannot build and scale their practice. They always remain confused about how to scale. You have to first decide which direction you want to take so that you can plan things and go on building your practice in that particular direction.

Kindly comment and tell us if you face any issues or if you think there is another way of scaling a practice that we have not discussed in this article, as we would like to know more about it. Any further questions kindly let us know.

If you want to know how to get more business from your existing clients then read these 2 articles, here. One tells you how to get more BUSINESS from the same clients and the second tells you how to get more CLIENTS from current clients.