How To Start Your Own Accounting Practice – Recast Episode: This episode was originally published on July 14, 2016, but it’s a favorite among our Growing Your Firm podcast community, so we’re bringing it back. Let us know in the comments below if you’ve listened to the podcast since this episode originally aired.
Meryl is a Chartered Accountant who worked in commercial accounting roles and as an auditor and lecturer before being playfully challenged by her friend and fellow entrepreneur to redefine the future of accounting. Seven days and a thousand dollars later, Bean Ninjas was born and has gone from strength to strength ever since. Along with Bean Ninjas, Meryl also runs her own consulting firm, MCJ Consulting, where she helps implement cloud accounting in businesses that need to make the transition.
How To Start Your Own Accounting Practice
Meryl has worked in commercial accounting roles and as an auditor and lecturer. She was tired of working late nights and weekends, no matter what she did. So she started MCJ Consulting to meet her lifestyle needs. “The first year after starting MCJ was great,” said Meryl. “Lots of surfing and fun projects, but then I wanted to build an MCJ.”
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In her work, she implemented many management-type projects. For example, she would work with a company that purchased new payroll software, and Meryl would help integrate it with the rest of the financial systems and then train the rest of the staff to use it properly. So it was difficult to find the right staff because of the diverse nature of the projects she was doing. Meryl visited India to see if she could outsource some of the office work. There in India she built a small team of dedicated professionals and launched a recurring/subscription based business.
She would take on clients one at a time, and the onboarding consultation process can take a while to convert those clients to the cloud tools, Xero and other add-ons she uses. Then she had her back office team produce a monthly report. But that would take several months to get clients from the sign-up stage to the point where the team processed their reports.
Meryl says that before moving to a recurring revenue approach, “cash flow was unpredictable. It was difficult to manage the sales pipeline—finish one project and have another one already lined up and ready. So from a cash flow perspective, the service’s recurring revenue was more predictable and for it also meant more consistent work for our employees.
While MCJ is a consulting agency, Bean Ninjas is an accounting firm. Meryl and Ben met in an online spiritual group that wasn’t even specifically aimed at accountants. Both followed Dan Norris’ “7-Day Start-up” movement, which suggested you could start a business and be successful in just 7 days. This attracted Meryl and Ben.
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When Meryl started MCJ, she didn’t have a business partner, and she really didn’t expect to have one. Meryl’s parents ran an engineering business and one of the first pieces of business advice her father gave her was to never have a business partner. However, she was very happy to have Ben as a co-founder. They had similar dreams, skills and visions and were much better off together.
“Ben and I had only met face to face once, but we had worked together a few months before.
They shared some clients and worked together on some of their projects, so they knew how well they worked together. They also took the time to have complex and detailed conversations ahead of time and sign an agreement with the co-founders.
Bean Ninjas launched in 2015. Although Meryl and her business partner Ben McAdam are accountants, they decided that bookkeeping was a repetitive process that they could train their people to do.
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In the first six months, Bean Ninjas had 15 customers, but in the next four months they acquired almost 40 customers. In the first 10 months of operation, they gained more than one customer per week. What has been happening in the last four months that has helped their customer base grow so much?
Much of their work comes from word of mouth. It takes time to build the kind of trust needed to get those kinds of referrals. Most of their client work comes from online communities, which is their target market. Meryl spends quite a bit of time adding value to these communities. The best thing you can do when building your customer base is to think about how you can add value to your community.
For example, Meryl saw people in her online community asking for feedback on a new website they were building. She would visit their website, take a good look at it and give them feedback on what worked and what she felt needed improvement. Similarly, if someone posted her new book online and asked for reviews, she would read it and then tell them what she liked and what could be improved.
Where does Meryl find the most valuable and vibrant communities? He says he is part of several paid communities. One is a Facebook group – Dan Norris’ 7 Day Start Up Program and another is called Dynamite Circle – where she met Ben. He is also part of several Facebook pages for accountants and bookkeepers. She is not even a passive participant. He is extremely active, devoting an hour a day just to correspondence with these groups. She also started her own group focused on bringing accountants and accounting professionals together.
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The important thing about these groups is that they don’t just participate and directly talk about their product. She connected and took the time to build relationships. Building a customer base takes time because you have to build individual relationships first. Cold calling? Door to door knocking? Cold mail? It just didn’t work for Meryl. It focuses solely on building relationships, one conversation at a time.
One way you can add value to your community is by providing desirable content. Meryl does this by writing articles/blog posts. Their typical process involves using Ideas and Trello to keep a record of their blog ideas. If you’re interested in content marketing, the first thing you need to do is create a content strategy for what you write. For Meryl, her strategy/focus is either educating others about accounting and bookkeeping or general business growth.
One of the most successful pieces of content Meryl publishes is the Bean Ninjas’ Business Report, where they report on how the business is doing. The report details their recurring revenue, churn rate, customer satisfaction ratings, etc. The report is an honest and transparent assessment of what’s working and what’s not.
We covered a lot of great information in the podcast. If you want to dive even deeper, be sure to check out the full episode! If you want to learn more about Meryl, her company and 7-Day Start-up, you can connect with her on LinkedIn!
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As you start your small business, you need to get on top of the accounting tasks that come with running a business. While accounting may not be the most exciting part of growing your business, it’s important to start off on the right foot.
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In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about small business accounting, as well as some of the best accounting software to consider so you can get to the next step on your small business financial to-do list.
Small business accounting is a set of financial activities for processing, measuring and communicating the finances of a business. These activities include tax, management, payroll, acquisitions and inventory.
Accounting is something you either have to learn or outsource if you have a business. Fortunately, it is possible to learn how to manage your own books, and there are some notable advantages to tackling it yourself.
A separate business bank account protects your personal assets in the unfortunate event of bankruptcy, lawsuits or audits. If you want line financing from lenders or investors, a strong business financial record can increase the likelihood of approval.
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Start by opening a checking account and then savings accounts to help you organize your cash flow and plan for your taxes. For example, you can set up a savings account and deduct a percentage of each payment as a self-employment tax deduction. A good rule of thumb is to set aside 25% of your income, even if the estimates are high