How to Scale Your Accounting Firm: 15 Tested Strategies

From navigating client acquisition strategies to building a qualified team you can depend on, the path to expanding your CPA firm can seem overwhelming. 

Plus, as you focus on scaling your business, you need to manage the delicate balance act of delivering quality service while expanding to enjoy sustainable growth. 

On our Growing Your Firm podcast, we recently sat down with 3 expert accountants to learn about time-tested strategies they used to scale their firms. In this article, we share their secrets to growth, which you can implement in your firm. 

Amplify Your Sales & Marketing

 

Specialize in Niche Markets 

Directing your accounting services to the needs of a niche market, like tourism and hospitality, allows you to build your expertise and become a leader in that specific industry. 

Specializing can help you expand your network and receive more referrals. 

Aly Garrett, founder of All in Advisory, leveraged her network to scale her firm and joined the Growing Your Firm podcast to share how she did it. 

For instance, Hudson points out that if you serve clients with more complex financials, you need to have more senior-level CPAs on staff who can handle the nature of this work with a high degree of accuracy. 

 

 

Put it into practice: Hire accountants with the industry-specific skills and experience to handle clients in your niche. Even if a candidate doesn’t have the specific certifications you want, consider those with the relevant hands-on experience your team needs to deliver positive client outcomes. 

Look for a Cultural Fit

In addition to confirming potential employees have the required skills to deliver quality work, seek prospects who fit well with your firm’s culture and align with its values. 

Prioritize candidates who share your firm’s style of work and can enhance team cohesion and collaboration, leading to more positive client outcomes. 

Building a scalable firm often comes down to making the right hiring decisions. You want to bring people on board who align with your firm’s mission and find ways to move your accounting practice forward. 

Put it into practice: Determine your firm’s guiding values and mission. When interviewing candidates, assess how well they match these principles while you evaluate the skills they possess to hire the right people for your team. Look for candidates who complement existing staff members so you can c

Durio shares her firm’s impressive ability to scale from five full-time employees to 50 at once to meet project needs. She credits this capability to the relationships she established with staffing firms who help her hire qualified temporary staff for their current workload. 

 

 

Put it into practice: Consider working with temporary staffing agencies online or in your local area to supply the extra employees you need for short-term surges in demand. Be sure to work with agencies that vet qualified accounting professionals capable of stepping in and handling the services you provide. 

Align Client Complexity with Team Skills

Hire team members with the skills to serve the clients in your niche. By offering expert service, you build client trust in your business, regardless of their unique needs. 

For instance, Hudson points out that if you serve clients with more complex financials, you need to have more senior-level CPAs on staff who can handle the nature of this work with a high degree of accuracy. 

 

 

Put it into practice: Hire accountants with the industry-specific skills and experience to handle clients in your niche. Even if a candidate doesn’t have the specific certifications you want, consider those with the relevant hands-on experience your team needs to deliver positive client outcomes. 

Look for a Cultural Fit

In addition to confirming potential employees have the required skills to deliver quality work, seek prospects who fit well with your firm’s culture and align with its values. 

Prioritize candidates who share your firm’s style of work and can enhance team cohesion and collaboration, leading to more positive client outcomes. 

Building a scalable firm often comes down to making the right hiring decisions. You want to bring people on board who align with your firm’s mission and find ways to move your accounting practice forward. 

Put it into practice: Determine your firm’s guiding values and mission. When interviewing candidates, assess how well they match these principles while you evaluate the skills they possess to hire the right people for your team. Look for candidates who complement existing staff members so you can c

Expert accountant Della Hudson discussed strategies for starting and growing a sellable business on her visit to the Growing Your Firm podcast. One of the keys to her success? Hudson says, “My business was highly systemized, and it wasn’t particularly dependent on me.”

 

 

In other words, if your business depends too much on you or a few staff members, growth can quickly stagnate once those key individuals reach their maximum work capacity. 

Put it into practice: Identify repetitive workflows or tasks you complete regularly for clients. Create a structured system for handling these tasks, using templates or checklists, to ensure they get completed to the same high standard every time. 

Instituting these systems makes it easy for another accountant to step in and handle the task if the principal staff member who typically completes it is unavailable. 

Introduce Your Team Early On 

Hudson also explains that the team members handling a specific client’s workload should be introduced to that client early on during the onboarding process. 

That helps establish a supportive team presence behind the scenes and lets the client put a friendly face to the services they’re receiving. 

“Right from the start, from the initial meeting, they [clients] would be introduced to the team,” Hudson shares. “We’d make the introductions so that people knew there was a team behind me.”

Put it into practice: Introduce new clients to their dedicated account management team at the outset of your engagement, virtually or in person. That can give them a sense of collective support, improving their satisfaction and your working relationship. 

Match Clients with Team Members 

To ensure clients receive high-quality service, firms should assign team members to accounts based on how advanced a client’s needs are. 

Hudson took that approach in her own firm, saying, “They [staff] were allocated according to the nature of the client, the complexity of the work.”

In other words, pair clients with highly complex needs with highly qualified accountants. You can then assign more straightforward clients to junior accounting professionals. 

Put it into practice: As you take on a new client, assess the complexity of their needs and identify the staff member on your team with the right skills and expertise for the account. That ensures the client gets the support and industry-specific service they require. 

Level Up How You Manage Your Team

Implement Strong Systems 

Developing robust systems for repeatable work processes allows for easier scaling, even as your team structure evolves. 

Hudson points out that systemizing her firm helped bring consistency to her service delivery, no matter which team members handled the deliverables. 

Luckily, plenty of tools and resources are available today, making it easy to systemize common accounting workflows. Leveraging these tools can bring more efficiency to your operations, plus they can scale with you to meet increased demand without sacrificing service quality.

Put it into practice: Invest in a sophisticated practice management system, like Jetpack Workflow, that helps you streamline repetitive workflows to turn client work around faster and allow your team to focus on more complex tasks. Train your staff in the program or software so everyone can utilize it and reap the full benefits. 

Regularly Rotate Assignments 

Swapping client sets within your team every few years can also benefit your firm’s growth. This strategy can give your staff fresh perspectives on client accounts, allowing them to share new and innovative approaches to helping clients. 

Hudson discussed her schedule for this practice, explaining, “After three years, I liked to swap [accounts] so we could get a fresh pair of eyes looking at the business.” This way, firms continue offering new value to clients, even after you’ve been working together for several years. 

Put it into practice: Set up a regular schedule for rotating client assignments every few years. Always pair clients with staff who have the appropriate experience and skills to handle the account. 

Set Revenue Targets for Team Members 

When growing your firm, you should also set clear revenue generation targets for your team members. Aim to have them bring in business at a multiple of their salary each year. 

For Hudson, this amount was three times a staff member’s annual salary, which she states is her general rule of thumb. 

Setting these revenue generation targets for your team aligns their work with your firm’s financial objectives and helps them focus on a clear, measurable goal. It can also foster a growth mindset, enabling your staff to seek out clients who can help scale the firm. 

Put it into practice: Determine the right salary multiple for your staff as a revenue target. A typical target is 2.5x to 3x your salary spent as revenue. Whatever target you select, ensure your staff are aware of it so they can monitor their progress throughout the year and stay on track. 

Upgrade Your Tech Stack

Adopt Advanced Workflow Solutions

Firms should adopt advanced workflow solutions like Jetpack Workflow to help automate their workflows and build an efficient, scalable service that grows revenues. 

Jetpack Workflow features task and project management tools that help teams plan upcoming work and manage recurring deadlines so no client work ever slips through the cracks: 

• Create custom workflow templates in seconds to handle repetitive client work
• Access 70 pre-built templates to organize common accounting workflows
• Automate critical deadlines
• Customize your workspace view to filter and search for clients or tasks easily 
• Monitor the “My Work” tab for current staff assignments and upcoming tasks
• Track your project tasks with the Progress Report to see which ones still need to be completed

Upgrading your tech stack with software solutions like Jetpack Workflow helps you simplify administrative tasks using convenient checklists and templates. This way, you can spend more time on billable client work and growing your firm. 

Put it into practice: Schedule a demo or use Jetpack Workflow’s 14-day free trial to test the platform’s features. Learn how it can help you handle recurring workflows and client work with greater precision and accuracy. 

Invest in Cloud Accounting Platforms 

As more firms adopt a remote or hybrid work model, transitioning to a cloud-based accounting platform is critical for team members completing client work from multiple locations. 

These platforms also enable real-time financial reporting and collaboration with clients. They can provide clients with the necessary insights to power business decisions, such as their current cash flow or whether they have pending invoices from vendors. 

Put it into practice: If you’re not already using a cloud accounting platform, try a few popular options, such as QuickBooks Online or Xero. Use their free trials to discover the best platform for your firm and clients. 

Automate Routine Tasks 

Automation tools can save your team valuable time and reduce errors in time-consuming and resource-intensive tasks like data entry, invoicing, and reporting.

For example, automating tasks like transaction categorization and receipt tracking can significantly reduce time on manual data entry. 

That allows you and your team to devote their time and resources to advisory services or other valuable offerings that grow your business revenue. 

Put it into practice: Identify repetitive and routine tasks that take time away from your staff’s day and aren’t billable work. Leverage digital tools with automation features, like Zapier, to set up rule-based triggers and put some of your team’s administrative and redundant work on autopilot. 

Get Better at Hiring

Flexible Staffing 

Consider flexible staffing solutions that enable your firm to scale up or down as needed to meet client demands. 

This approach allows you to expand and take on new projects when the opportunity arises without the rigid fixed costs of maintaining a large, full-time team. 

Durio shares her firm’s impressive ability to scale from five full-time employees to 50 at once to meet project needs. She credits this capability to the relationships she established with staffing firms who help her hire qualified temporary staff for their current workload. 

 

 

Put it into practice: Consider working with temporary staffing agencies online or in your local area to supply the extra employees you need for short-term surges in demand. Be sure to work with agencies that vet qualified accounting professionals capable of stepping in and handling the services you provide. 

Align Client Complexity with Team Skills

Hire team members with the skills to serve the clients in your niche. By offering expert service, you build client trust in your business, regardless of their unique needs. 

For instance, Hudson points out that if you serve clients with more complex financials, you need to have more senior-level CPAs on staff who can handle the nature of this work with a high degree of accuracy. 

 

 

Put it into practice: Hire accountants with the industry-specific skills and experience to handle clients in your niche. Even if a candidate doesn’t have the specific certifications you want, consider those with the relevant hands-on experience your team needs to deliver positive client outcomes. 

Look for a Cultural Fit

In addition to confirming potential employees have the required skills to deliver quality work, seek prospects who fit well with your firm’s culture and align with its values. 

Prioritize candidates who share your firm’s style of work and can enhance team cohesion and collaboration, leading to more positive client outcomes. 

Building a scalable firm often comes down to making the right hiring decisions. You want to bring people on board who align with your firm’s mission and find ways to move your accounting practice forward. 

Put it into practice: Determine your firm’s guiding values and mission. When interviewing candidates, assess how well they match these principles while you evaluate the skills they possess to hire the right people for your team. Look for candidates who complement existing staff members so you can c

Nicole Durio, the managing principal at Madison Brothers Consulting Group, stopped by the Growing Your Firm podcast and went into detail about utilizing this business strategy to grow her own firm. She says, “Our relationship with them [joint venture partners] allows us to capitalize on more volume… volume that we would not get otherwise.”

 

 

Put it into practice: Reach out to other professional service providers in your network, such as marketing firms or business consultancies. Set up a meeting to see about creating a possible joint venture with a set compensation structure. 

Use Social Media for Organic Outreach  

During her interview, Garrett also described the importance of social media in her firm’s client acquisition strategy. 

She says, “It’s about branding and putting yourself, basically, in their face literally every day. This subconscious thing happens, where if they need you, all of the sudden they just think of you and make contact.”

You can engage with clients, organically build your brand, and grow your firm’s visibility with potential clients through social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. 

If you offer value through frequent posts and uploads, you’ll be the first person that comes to mind when they need accounting services. 

Put it into practice: Use your firm’s social media accounts to connect and interact with individuals in your niche. Contribute free value to your online community through regular posts, which can help you become your followers’ go-to expert in their industry. 

Be Thoughtful about Your Team Structure

Systemize Your Business 

Another essential element to successfully scaling your firm is operating an efficient business that isn’t overly dependent on any one individual — including you, the owner. 

Expert accountant Della Hudson discussed strategies for starting and growing a sellable business on her visit to the Growing Your Firm podcast. One of the keys to her success? Hudson says, “My business was highly systemized, and it wasn’t particularly dependent on me.”

 

 

In other words, if your business depends too much on you or a few staff members, growth can quickly stagnate once those key individuals reach their maximum work capacity. 

Put it into practice: Identify repetitive workflows or tasks you complete regularly for clients. Create a structured system for handling these tasks, using templates or checklists, to ensure they get completed to the same high standard every time. 

Instituting these systems makes it easy for another accountant to step in and handle the task if the principal staff member who typically completes it is unavailable. 

Introduce Your Team Early On 

Hudson also explains that the team members handling a specific client’s workload should be introduced to that client early on during the onboarding process. 

That helps establish a supportive team presence behind the scenes and lets the client put a friendly face to the services they’re receiving. 

“Right from the start, from the initial meeting, they [clients] would be introduced to the team,” Hudson shares. “We’d make the introductions so that people knew there was a team behind me.”

Put it into practice: Introduce new clients to their dedicated account management team at the outset of your engagement, virtually or in person. That can give them a sense of collective support, improving their satisfaction and your working relationship. 

Match Clients with Team Members 

To ensure clients receive high-quality service, firms should assign team members to accounts based on how advanced a client’s needs are. 

Hudson took that approach in her own firm, saying, “They [staff] were allocated according to the nature of the client, the complexity of the work.”

In other words, pair clients with highly complex needs with highly qualified accountants. You can then assign more straightforward clients to junior accounting professionals. 

Put it into practice: As you take on a new client, assess the complexity of their needs and identify the staff member on your team with the right skills and expertise for the account. That ensures the client gets the support and industry-specific service they require. 

Level Up How You Manage Your Team

Implement Strong Systems 

Developing robust systems for repeatable work processes allows for easier scaling, even as your team structure evolves. 

Hudson points out that systemizing her firm helped bring consistency to her service delivery, no matter which team members handled the deliverables. 

Luckily, plenty of tools and resources are available today, making it easy to systemize common accounting workflows. Leveraging these tools can bring more efficiency to your operations, plus they can scale with you to meet increased demand without sacrificing service quality.

Put it into practice: Invest in a sophisticated practice management system, like Jetpack Workflow, that helps you streamline repetitive workflows to turn client work around faster and allow your team to focus on more complex tasks. Train your staff in the program or software so everyone can utilize it and reap the full benefits. 

Regularly Rotate Assignments 

Swapping client sets within your team every few years can also benefit your firm’s growth. This strategy can give your staff fresh perspectives on client accounts, allowing them to share new and innovative approaches to helping clients. 

Hudson discussed her schedule for this practice, explaining, “After three years, I liked to swap [accounts] so we could get a fresh pair of eyes looking at the business.” This way, firms continue offering new value to clients, even after you’ve been working together for several years. 

Put it into practice: Set up a regular schedule for rotating client assignments every few years. Always pair clients with staff who have the appropriate experience and skills to handle the account. 

Set Revenue Targets for Team Members 

When growing your firm, you should also set clear revenue generation targets for your team members. Aim to have them bring in business at a multiple of their salary each year. 

For Hudson, this amount was three times a staff member’s annual salary, which she states is her general rule of thumb. 

Setting these revenue generation targets for your team aligns their work with your firm’s financial objectives and helps them focus on a clear, measurable goal. It can also foster a growth mindset, enabling your staff to seek out clients who can help scale the firm. 

Put it into practice: Determine the right salary multiple for your staff as a revenue target. A typical target is 2.5x to 3x your salary spent as revenue. Whatever target you select, ensure your staff are aware of it so they can monitor their progress throughout the year and stay on track. 

Upgrade Your Tech Stack

Adopt Advanced Workflow Solutions

Firms should adopt advanced workflow solutions like Jetpack Workflow to help automate their workflows and build an efficient, scalable service that grows revenues. 

Jetpack Workflow features task and project management tools that help teams plan upcoming work and manage recurring deadlines so no client work ever slips through the cracks: 

• Create custom workflow templates in seconds to handle repetitive client work
• Access 70 pre-built templates to organize common accounting workflows
• Automate critical deadlines
• Customize your workspace view to filter and search for clients or tasks easily 
• Monitor the “My Work” tab for current staff assignments and upcoming tasks
• Track your project tasks with the Progress Report to see which ones still need to be completed

Upgrading your tech stack with software solutions like Jetpack Workflow helps you simplify administrative tasks using convenient checklists and templates. This way, you can spend more time on billable client work and growing your firm. 

Put it into practice: Schedule a demo or use Jetpack Workflow’s 14-day free trial to test the platform’s features. Learn how it can help you handle recurring workflows and client work with greater precision and accuracy. 

Invest in Cloud Accounting Platforms 

As more firms adopt a remote or hybrid work model, transitioning to a cloud-based accounting platform is critical for team members completing client work from multiple locations. 

These platforms also enable real-time financial reporting and collaboration with clients. They can provide clients with the necessary insights to power business decisions, such as their current cash flow or whether they have pending invoices from vendors. 

Put it into practice: If you’re not already using a cloud accounting platform, try a few popular options, such as QuickBooks Online or Xero. Use their free trials to discover the best platform for your firm and clients. 

Automate Routine Tasks 

Automation tools can save your team valuable time and reduce errors in time-consuming and resource-intensive tasks like data entry, invoicing, and reporting.

For example, automating tasks like transaction categorization and receipt tracking can significantly reduce time on manual data entry. 

That allows you and your team to devote their time and resources to advisory services or other valuable offerings that grow your business revenue. 

Put it into practice: Identify repetitive and routine tasks that take time away from your staff’s day and aren’t billable work. Leverage digital tools with automation features, like Zapier, to set up rule-based triggers and put some of your team’s administrative and redundant work on autopilot. 

Get Better at Hiring

Flexible Staffing 

Consider flexible staffing solutions that enable your firm to scale up or down as needed to meet client demands. 

This approach allows you to expand and take on new projects when the opportunity arises without the rigid fixed costs of maintaining a large, full-time team. 

Durio shares her firm’s impressive ability to scale from five full-time employees to 50 at once to meet project needs. She credits this capability to the relationships she established with staffing firms who help her hire qualified temporary staff for their current workload. 

 

 

Put it into practice: Consider working with temporary staffing agencies online or in your local area to supply the extra employees you need for short-term surges in demand. Be sure to work with agencies that vet qualified accounting professionals capable of stepping in and handling the services you provide. 

Align Client Complexity with Team Skills

Hire team members with the skills to serve the clients in your niche. By offering expert service, you build client trust in your business, regardless of their unique needs. 

For instance, Hudson points out that if you serve clients with more complex financials, you need to have more senior-level CPAs on staff who can handle the nature of this work with a high degree of accuracy. 

 

 

Put it into practice: Hire accountants with the industry-specific skills and experience to handle clients in your niche. Even if a candidate doesn’t have the specific certifications you want, consider those with the relevant hands-on experience your team needs to deliver positive client outcomes. 

Look for a Cultural Fit

In addition to confirming potential employees have the required skills to deliver quality work, seek prospects who fit well with your firm’s culture and align with its values. 

Prioritize candidates who share your firm’s style of work and can enhance team cohesion and collaboration, leading to more positive client outcomes. 

Building a scalable firm often comes down to making the right hiring decisions. You want to bring people on board who align with your firm’s mission and find ways to move your accounting practice forward. 

Put it into practice: Determine your firm’s guiding values and mission. When interviewing candidates, assess how well they match these principles while you evaluate the skills they possess to hire the right people for your team. Look for candidates who complement existing staff members so you can c

“I built networks and connections in industry associations and also within my industry,” says Garrett. “So I was actually getting referrals from other accountants, from other bookkeepers, from lawyers, from bankers who knew what we did and had people that needed help.”

 

 

Put it into practice: Zero in on your unique area of expertise or the specific clientele you enjoy serving most. Establish yourself as the industry expert by tailoring your services to this niche rather than offering general services that could apply to all industries. 

Explore Joint Ventures

Strategically partnering with other firms that offer complementary skills or resources can help you scale your firm. 

Joint ventures can help you cost-effectively earn business, take on larger projects, and expand your service offerings without increasing your fixed costs significantly. 

And your joint venture partners can promote your services to clients who require accounting services while you promote their services to your network. You can grow your businesses together without investing in your own client acquisition campaigns. 

Nicole Durio, the managing principal at Madison Brothers Consulting Group, stopped by the Growing Your Firm podcast and went into detail about utilizing this business strategy to grow her own firm. She says, “Our relationship with them [joint venture partners] allows us to capitalize on more volume… volume that we would not get otherwise.”

 

 

Put it into practice: Reach out to other professional service providers in your network, such as marketing firms or business consultancies. Set up a meeting to see about creating a possible joint venture with a set compensation structure. 

Use Social Media for Organic Outreach  

During her interview, Garrett also described the importance of social media in her firm’s client acquisition strategy. 

She says, “It’s about branding and putting yourself, basically, in their face literally every day. This subconscious thing happens, where if they need you, all of the sudden they just think of you and make contact.”

You can engage with clients, organically build your brand, and grow your firm’s visibility with potential clients through social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. 

If you offer value through frequent posts and uploads, you’ll be the first person that comes to mind when they need accounting services. 

Put it into practice: Use your firm’s social media accounts to connect and interact with individuals in your niche. Contribute free value to your online community through regular posts, which can help you become your followers’ go-to expert in their industry. 

Be Thoughtful about Your Team Structure

Systemize Your Business 

Another essential element to successfully scaling your firm is operating an efficient business that isn’t overly dependent on any one individual — including you, the owner. 

Expert accountant Della Hudson discussed strategies for starting and growing a sellable business on her visit to the Growing Your Firm podcast. One of the keys to her success? Hudson says, “My business was highly systemized, and it wasn’t particularly dependent on me.”

 

 

In other words, if your business depends too much on you or a few staff members, growth can quickly stagnate once those key individuals reach their maximum work capacity. 

Put it into practice: Identify repetitive workflows or tasks you complete regularly for clients. Create a structured system for handling these tasks, using templates or checklists, to ensure they get completed to the same high standard every time. 

Instituting these systems makes it easy for another accountant to step in and handle the task if the principal staff member who typically completes it is unavailable. 

Introduce Your Team Early On 

Hudson also explains that the team members handling a specific client’s workload should be introduced to that client early on during the onboarding process. 

That helps establish a supportive team presence behind the scenes and lets the client put a friendly face to the services they’re receiving. 

“Right from the start, from the initial meeting, they [clients] would be introduced to the team,” Hudson shares. “We’d make the introductions so that people knew there was a team behind me.”

Put it into practice: Introduce new clients to their dedicated account management team at the outset of your engagement, virtually or in person. That can give them a sense of collective support, improving their satisfaction and your working relationship. 

Match Clients with Team Members 

To ensure clients receive high-quality service, firms should assign team members to accounts based on how advanced a client’s needs are. 

Hudson took that approach in her own firm, saying, “They [staff] were allocated according to the nature of the client, the complexity of the work.”

In other words, pair clients with highly complex needs with highly qualified accountants. You can then assign more straightforward clients to junior accounting professionals. 

Put it into practice: As you take on a new client, assess the complexity of their needs and identify the staff member on your team with the right skills and expertise for the account. That ensures the client gets the support and industry-specific service they require. 

Level Up How You Manage Your Team

Implement Strong Systems 

Developing robust systems for repeatable work processes allows for easier scaling, even as your team structure evolves. 

Hudson points out that systemizing her firm helped bring consistency to her service delivery, no matter which team members handled the deliverables. 

Luckily, plenty of tools and resources are available today, making it easy to systemize common accounting workflows. Leveraging these tools can bring more efficiency to your operations, plus they can scale with you to meet increased demand without sacrificing service quality.

Put it into practice: Invest in a sophisticated practice management system, like Jetpack Workflow, that helps you streamline repetitive workflows to turn client work around faster and allow your team to focus on more complex tasks. Train your staff in the program or software so everyone can utilize it and reap the full benefits. 

Regularly Rotate Assignments 

Swapping client sets within your team every few years can also benefit your firm’s growth. This strategy can give your staff fresh perspectives on client accounts, allowing them to share new and innovative approaches to helping clients. 

Hudson discussed her schedule for this practice, explaining, “After three years, I liked to swap [accounts] so we could get a fresh pair of eyes looking at the business.” This way, firms continue offering new value to clients, even after you’ve been working together for several years. 

Put it into practice: Set up a regular schedule for rotating client assignments every few years. Always pair clients with staff who have the appropriate experience and skills to handle the account. 

Set Revenue Targets for Team Members 

When growing your firm, you should also set clear revenue generation targets for your team members. Aim to have them bring in business at a multiple of their salary each year. 

For Hudson, this amount was three times a staff member’s annual salary, which she states is her general rule of thumb. 

Setting these revenue generation targets for your team aligns their work with your firm’s financial objectives and helps them focus on a clear, measurable goal. It can also foster a growth mindset, enabling your staff to seek out clients who can help scale the firm. 

Put it into practice: Determine the right salary multiple for your staff as a revenue target. A typical target is 2.5x to 3x your salary spent as revenue. Whatever target you select, ensure your staff are aware of it so they can monitor their progress throughout the year and stay on track. 

Upgrade Your Tech Stack

Adopt Advanced Workflow Solutions

Firms should adopt advanced workflow solutions like Jetpack Workflow to help automate their workflows and build an efficient, scalable service that grows revenues. 

Jetpack Workflow features task and project management tools that help teams plan upcoming work and manage recurring deadlines so no client work ever slips through the cracks: 

• Create custom workflow templates in seconds to handle repetitive client work
• Access 70 pre-built templates to organize common accounting workflows
• Automate critical deadlines
• Customize your workspace view to filter and search for clients or tasks easily 
• Monitor the “My Work” tab for current staff assignments and upcoming tasks
• Track your project tasks with the Progress Report to see which ones still need to be completed

Upgrading your tech stack with software solutions like Jetpack Workflow helps you simplify administrative tasks using convenient checklists and templates. This way, you can spend more time on billable client work and growing your firm. 

Put it into practice: Schedule a demo or use Jetpack Workflow’s 14-day free trial to test the platform’s features. Learn how it can help you handle recurring workflows and client work with greater precision and accuracy. 

Invest in Cloud Accounting Platforms 

As more firms adopt a remote or hybrid work model, transitioning to a cloud-based accounting platform is critical for team members completing client work from multiple locations. 

These platforms also enable real-time financial reporting and collaboration with clients. They can provide clients with the necessary insights to power business decisions, such as their current cash flow or whether they have pending invoices from vendors. 

Put it into practice: If you’re not already using a cloud accounting platform, try a few popular options, such as QuickBooks Online or Xero. Use their free trials to discover the best platform for your firm and clients. 

Automate Routine Tasks 

Automation tools can save your team valuable time and reduce errors in time-consuming and resource-intensive tasks like data entry, invoicing, and reporting.

For example, automating tasks like transaction categorization and receipt tracking can significantly reduce time on manual data entry. 

That allows you and your team to devote their time and resources to advisory services or other valuable offerings that grow your business revenue. 

Put it into practice: Identify repetitive and routine tasks that take time away from your staff’s day and aren’t billable work. Leverage digital tools with automation features, like Zapier, to set up rule-based triggers and put some of your team’s administrative and redundant work on autopilot. 

Get Better at Hiring

Flexible Staffing 

Consider flexible staffing solutions that enable your firm to scale up or down as needed to meet client demands. 

This approach allows you to expand and take on new projects when the opportunity arises without the rigid fixed costs of maintaining a large, full-time team. 

Durio shares her firm’s impressive ability to scale from five full-time employees to 50 at once to meet project needs. She credits this capability to the relationships she established with staffing firms who help her hire qualified temporary staff for their current workload. 

 

 

Put it into practice: Consider working with temporary staffing agencies online or in your local area to supply the extra employees you need for short-term surges in demand. Be sure to work with agencies that vet qualified accounting professionals capable of stepping in and handling the services you provide. 

Align Client Complexity with Team Skills

Hire team members with the skills to serve the clients in your niche. By offering expert service, you build client trust in your business, regardless of their unique needs. 

For instance, Hudson points out that if you serve clients with more complex financials, you need to have more senior-level CPAs on staff who can handle the nature of this work with a high degree of accuracy. 

 

 

Put it into practice: Hire accountants with the industry-specific skills and experience to handle clients in your niche. Even if a candidate doesn’t have the specific certifications you want, consider those with the relevant hands-on experience your team needs to deliver positive client outcomes. 

Look for a Cultural Fit

In addition to confirming potential employees have the required skills to deliver quality work, seek prospects who fit well with your firm’s culture and align with its values. 

Prioritize candidates who share your firm’s style of work and can enhance team cohesion and collaboration, leading to more positive client outcomes. 

Building a scalable firm often comes down to making the right hiring decisions. You want to bring people on board who align with your firm’s mission and find ways to move your accounting practice forward. 

Put it into practice: Determine your firm’s guiding values and mission. When interviewing candidates, assess how well they match these principles while you evaluate the skills they possess to hire the right people for your team. Look for candidates who complement existing staff members so you can c