Sending Out Your Ships for Sail

An associate of the great Napoleon Hill (Sidney Bremer) once said: “Your ship cannot come in unless you have first sent ships out.”
Today is just 10 days before the October 15th extension deadline, and many tax professionals are keeping their heads down and cranking out those final returns. But you know what the smartest ones are doing?
Preparing to send out their ships.
Notice something: Bremer didn’t say “Your ship cannot come in unless you have first sent a ship out,” he said you need to send out ships (PLURAL), and my guess is he meant lots of ships.
This is true of marketing your tax or accounting business. Simply put, when you are in new client acquisition mode, you need to try lots of stuff. From this, “LOTS of stuff” you’ll find the stuff that works, and you expand on it, and you grow.
Once you cross over that October 15th finish line, it’s going to be time to begin the process of investing in your new client acquisition strategies. And my recommendation? Prepare to try many different ideas.
When I ran the marketing for our tax firm, every tax season we would try about half a dozen new things — media, messages, offers, etc. And that was on top of about the 25 or so proven marketing pieces which we relied on each year. How do you think we grew so rapidly to 24,000+ clients?
New clients don’t come in via “hope”.
So– if you’re looking to grow (or even to simply maintain your current client list), prepare to make some investments come January and February … and start preparing THIS year, for what those marketing investments (your “ships”) should look like.
And, of course, we’ll be in your corner — some great tricks are up our sleeves for 2013, and you’ll start to see them in the next couple months.