Increase Your Firm's Visibility

Source: Solutions for CPA Firm Leaders

The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from an article by Rita Keller.

How do you bring in new clients and retain current clients? Create a buzz about your firm. You and your team members can do it yourself and it doesn't have to be extremely expensive.

Here's a way to use old-fashioned networking to be more visible and to create a buzz about your firm. Identify the major business networking events being held in the next six months in your city or town. Do the same for the charitable fundraising events.

Create a schedule identifying your partners and team members who will attend each event. If you are a firm leader specifically identify a less experienced team member to shadow you at the event. Often, less experienced team members are more anxious to talk about the positives of your firm than the seasoned team members.

Make sure you have several people in attendance, even if you need to request that a member of the administrative team represent the firm. Depending on the size of the firm and the size of the event, strive to have four, six, or eight people in attendance.

Several times during my years at a growing regional firm, people would come up to me at a business networking event and remark, “Your firm must really be growing, I just met three other people from your firm.” Did that mean that we were growing? No. It just meant that we were able to create a buzz about the firm.

Look ahead for each three- to six-month period and create a schedule for being visible, in significant numbers, at business and community events.

For the complete article, read “Create a Buzz About Your CPA Firm – Networking Events.”

From Solutions for CPA Firm Leaders, Rita Keller's CPA MAP Newsletter, www.ritakeller.com, November 2011.