Organic growth is one of the soundest growth strategies practices can pursue as a practice owner, adviser or accountant
A key part of my role in No More Practice 4 involves advising Sam Henderson on the best growth strategies for his successful SMSF advice practice. Organic growth is one of the soundest growth strategies practices can pursue as a practice owner, adviser or accountant. The best way to generate organic growth is to make sure you have happy clients as they will refer other people to you and build your new advisory client base.
Generally you have to ask people if they would like to refer you on to friends, family or others who might benefit as a result of your services, but you’re not going to get those referrals unless you are providing your existing clients with good service.
Another way of generating organic growth for your practice is through providing more services to existing clients. For example, most people in the market just provided investment advice when we started Count. We were probably one of the first firms that incorporated loans into our advice, because we saw the need to look after both sides of the balance sheet you might say.
Not everybody has money to invest, but most people start with a loan so this was a natural area to expand into for us in looking after this service for clients. There are many other services you can provide for clients to make sure you become the “one stop shop” for your clients. We call this entanglement, so the more good services you are able to provide to clients, the less likely they are to leave you and the more revenue you generate from existing clients.
For example, in the accounting space, you can look after clients’ tax returns, their accounts, self-managed superannuation, their home loan, business loans, insurance and so on. Even if you’re under the pump at a busy time of the year and a bit slow in getting their accounts done, the more services that you provide to a client makes it harder for them to leave you. So entanglement is not only a great organic growth strategy but also assists significantly in client retention.
Now of course you have to be competent and professional in delivering those services in the first place if you are to succeed in providing clients with a greater range of advice. So the one important caveat here is that you can’t abuse this and provide clients with poor service once you have increased the number of services you provide to them. But if you do a good job you’ll never lose that client because it will be too hard for them to find anybody else like you – when you put your clients out of reach of your competition you have a great business others will want to buy.
