How to Build A Scalable Accounting Firm

For many CPAs, running a successful solo practice is an accomplishment all itself, balancing long, demanding hours with delivering exceptional client services and holding down a personal life. Growing and taking more clients, more employees, more work, and more responsibility sounds like a monumental undertaking - one in which the reward just doesn’t seem to justify the risk.?

But, daunting as it might sound, making your firm more agile and scalable can pay off dividends in both the short and long term. Revenue growth aside, building a more scalable firm that can grow without bumps or interruptions to your productivity and efficiency means it’s more adaptable - something that all firms should be chasing in today’s market. A flexible firm can expand as capacity increases and vice versa.?

Even if you’re operating solo and are not planning to grow your firm in the foreseeable future, putting the processes in place for easy growth and scaling now will make it easier for you to hit the ground running should you change your mind. Don’t underestimate how far a little operational housekeeping can go in setting you up for ongoing success.?

Making your firm more scalable doesn’t just make it easier to grow, it can improve your entire operating procedure, down to each menial process, driving better efficiency across your practice.

How to Build a Scalable Firm

Making scalability a priority in your practice means you need to find the perfect marriage of technology, people and processes. This may look a little in each practice depending on its size, service focus and clientele, but it’s a good rule of thumb to always incorporate these three key focuses when assessing every area of your practice for strengths and weaknesses.?

Set goals for your practice

Before you begin implementing any changes, big or small, set aside some time to think about what you want to achieve in your practice. What sort of growth and efficiency are you looking to unlock? What are you currently struggling with??

Identifying your problems and roadblocks can help you determine what goals you want to achieve by making your firm more scalable.?

Perhaps you’re struggling with never-ending scope creep that’s eating away at your capacity. Or do your existing tools or processes slow down task execution, trapping you in a permanent cycle of repetitive activities that take away your attention from more important things?

Do a thorough assessment of where your firm is currently at. Map out your existing workflows and processes to identify inefficiencies and where improvements can be made. List your clients and the work you do for them to identify if they’ll fit into your newer, scalable model of operating.

Make sure your goals are set and that they translate into tangible deliverables that can be actioned.?

Streamline and document your workflows

I can’t stress this enough - document and record everything. Your tasks, your processes and your workflow. Not only does it make it easier to analyze your operations from both a high-level and granular level, but it also helps with process standardization.?

Having established methods and workflows that you can share with new employees speeds up the onboarding process and minimizes the chances of knowledge gaps and information silos from forming, both of which can grind your growth to a halt if left unchecked.?

No matter your firm’s size or focus, scaling should always start with process standardization. Spend a few days documenting every task you perform or your team performs. Make notes, screen record and write out step-by-step instructions. By the end of it, you should have standard operating procedures in place that anyone joining your team can easily follow.?

Build the right tech stack

Your existing tech stack might work just fine at your current firm size, but this will likely change as it expands. Growing your practice does mean you’ll need to extend and improve your existing workflows to accommodate new employees, new teams and new clients.?

Technology can provide quick wins here, boosting efficiency and productivity while reducing time spent on manual tasks. Focus on incorporating client-facing tools that automate document collection, aggregate and store important data on a single interface and create and send reminders and invoices. Also ensure you’ve got the best tools for making your team’s job as easy as possible, streamlining communications, information sharing and collaboration.

Productize your services

I’ve said this before - turning your service into buyable product bundles or packages expands your service appeal to a wider client base and encourages client retention through package upgrades and specializations.?

Productizing your services into packages for purchase or on a monthly subscription is also essential for when you begin to scale. Without standardization of your services, you’ll be stuck doing a dozen different things in all sorts of different ways for different clients - meaning you’re going to hit a wall quickly when scaling.?

Try to tier your services so there’s a clear distinction between packages, which will subtly encourage clients to opt for the higher-value packages that cost more.?

Trust your team - delegate responsibility

If you’re operating as a solo practitioner, chances are you’re used to wearing dozens of different hats but as you expand, this will eventually become impossible to keep up. As you build a team or extend your existing team, it’s essential to delegate tasks to them and trust that they’re capable of running the show, even in your absence.?

If you’ve thoroughly documented your standard operating procedures and built an agile tech stack, they should be more than up to the task - they should excel at what they do. Delegating tasks you would normally perform to them shows that you trust them and frees up your time to focus on more important core tasks and responsibilities, like scheduling meetings with new clients and service upscaling.?