4 ways to give your business, team and clients a boost

It can be hard to feel motivated when your commute’s a slog, you’re working from the same grubby desk in the corner, and you feel like a tape recorder answering clients’ questions. Just like baking, cooking or gardening – with the right ingredients, you can transform the mundane into miracle work. And the best part? It’s easier than you think.

1. Grow your client base with client testimonials

James Byrne, an accountant and one of the founders of Bright’s practice management software, BrightManager, has two recommendations.

• The first recommendation is doing it the ‘Google way’.

• Secondly, list your business on Google.

2. Ask the right questions to improve your services

Ask your clients what they want from your services. There might be a missing piece from your offering that could make them look elsewhere. Other areas to consider is customer service and business advice. This provides certainty around where clients are receiving the type of value they want, and where adjustments may be needed.

Surveys are a great way to do this. Not only asking for suggestions from clients, but to check in on how everyone’s doing. You could discover opportunities to start introducing new services or to completely scrap others.

If you’re using Bright’s practice management software, you can easily create surveys through our forms and add them to your clients’ portals to fill out. They’ll get an email asking them to complete it, and you’ll then get a notification when they’ve completed it.

3. Talk to your team. Listen to your team. And aim to be challenged

So, we’ve dealt with clients, now let’s pull things a bit more inward. When it comes to your team, encourage open (and even anonymous) feedback. Doing things like this keeps staff happy and helps ensure you’re building a great team. You don’t want to have a big churn of staff members, so if you can keep the same team on board and everybody feels like they’ve got a voice, that’s invaluable.

Provide them with the opportunity to complete a survey to tell you how they feel about the firm. This could provide insights on how they feel about management, communication, and changes would they like to see?

4. Block out time to digest ideas, think big and plan ahead

We’ve talked about listening to your clients and your team, now what about you, the business owner? Do you listen to your own thoughts and ideas in the same proactive way? Watch an inspiring webinar, read a good article, or block out some time in your calendar to assess and expand on those. This is when you put your thinking hat on, and can give you space to focus on the bigger picture, rather than the daily nitty gritty tasks of running a firm.

Here at Bright, we create software for tax, compliance, practice management and payroll, and are on a mission to make a happy and efficient working life a reality for accountants through reliable software and amazing support. If you’d like to see our multi-award-winning software in action, book a quick demo below.

This content may have been developed with the assistance of AI tools. Content is reviewed by a member of the Bright team before publication. Guidance on legislation can be obtained from your industry body.