Accountants and bookkeepers

A client is not a sale, it is a subscription that runs for seven years. Very little accountancy marketing is priced as though that were true.

You are an accountancy or bookkeeping practice. Clients pay monthly or annually, they stay a long time when they are well matched, and January decides a large part of your year.

Book a call What we do

An accountant working through documents with a calculator at a desk

Enquiries arrive, some become clients, and you have never worked out what you can afford to pay for one because nobody has calculated what one is actually worth.

What we keep finding

Four things that hold practices back.

Lifetime value is never calculated
Practices know their monthly fee and not their average client tenure, so they cannot say what a client is worth. Without that number, every conversation about marketing budget is a conversation about how nervous everybody feels.
All clients are treated as equally desirable
A sole trader on a thirty pound monthly fee and a limited company on four hundred take similar amounts of marketing effort and are worth wildly different amounts. Advertising that does not distinguish them buys whichever is cheaper.
The January rush is the whole marketing plan
Demand spikes around deadlines and practices respond by advertising into the spike, when the competition is highest and the clients are most rushed. The clients acquired calmly in July stay longer.
Churn is not measured, so growth looks better than it is
A practice adding forty clients and losing thirty five is not growing, it is running. Without a churn number the acquisition figure is meaningless and the marketing gets praised for it anyway.

The arithmetic

Why the value number changes everything.

These are illustrative rather than from a client, and they are the sum that most practices have never done. A modest monthly fee, an ordinary tenure, and a budget decision that looks completely different once they are multiplied.

£180

average monthly fee

illustrative

5.2 yrs

average tenure

illustrative

£11,232

what one client is worth

the sum

Hands marking up financial documents on a desk

The practice already holds every number needed to run this properly. It is almost always in the billing system and almost never in the marketing conversation.

What we measure here

The numbers a practice actually runs on.

Enquiry, meeting held, client onboarded, as separate events
Recurring fee value attached to each new client, not a flat conversion
Client tenure and churn measured, then used to set what acquisition may cost
Client type segmented, so the practice can advertise for the ones it wants more of
Seasonal plan that deliberately spends outside the deadline crush
Referral and introducer channels measured as channels, because they usually are the best ones
Onboarding time measured, since a slow start is the most common reason a good client leaves early

Questions people ask

The ones that actually arrive.

We do not really want more clients, we want better ones.

Then this is exactly the right work and the advertising is a smaller part of it than you would think. Knowing which client profile stays longest and pays best, and pointing everything at that profile, is most of the job. It sometimes means turning enquiries away, and we will say so.

Can you pull the numbers out of Xero or our practice software?

Usually, at an aggregate level, which is all that is needed. Fee values and tenure by client, with no client names or financial detail leaving your control. We would rather have a rough number from a summary than a perfect one from an integration project.

Is there anything in the AI side for us?

Yes, and it is often more valuable than the advertising. Onboarding, records chasing and the repetitive parts of the query load are all automatable with a person checking the output. That is real capacity, and capacity is what limits most practices rather than demand.

Most of our growth is word of mouth.

Then the first job is making that measurable, and the second is making it deliberate. Practices in this position are usually one small process away from doubling the referral rate, and it costs nothing in media.

Proof

An Australian taxi company

More calls, at less than half the cost, by telling Google which callers paid.

A different sector, included for one reason: it is the clearest thing we own that shows what happens when the advertising is finally told what a customer is worth.

Read the case study

+27%

more booking calls

−56%

lower cost per call

$2.10

average cost per click

Where this usually starts