Many ambitious small business owners of professional service firms want to grow their business, and there are many varied strategies for taking a professional services firm to the next level.
Whether your professional services business provides marketing services, legal services, accounting services, management consulting services, or any number of other professional services to its clients, a well-planned growth strategy can be key for achieving sustained growth for your business. So, let’s look at six strategies that can help you achieve meaningful and sustained growth for your professional services firm.
1. Upsell more services to your existing customers
A great growth strategy to expand a service business is to increase market penetration. The term “increase market penetration” is essentially a fancy way of saying, “offer more services to your existing clients”.
Because this tactic doesn’t require introducing anything new to your professional services firm, it’s a relatively low-risk strategy that can be achieved fairly easily without you needing to upskill or change the structure of your business.
While you may currently only offer one or two services to some of your existing clients, there may be more ways that you can help them. So it may be worth your while to reach out to all your existing clients and take them through the full suite of professional services your firm provides.
A good business rule of thumb is to never assume that your clients are aware of the full suite of professional services your firm provides. Such assumptions may lead to existing clients going elsewhere for services that your firm could easily have offered them.
2. Seek out new markets
Another relatively low-risk growth strategy for your professional services firm can be finding new markets for your existing services. This is a common growth strategy for the professional services industry, as many firms seek to extend their services to as many audiences as possible.
Developing new markets for your professional services firm can be time-consuming and costly – which comes with the territory when you’re educating and nurturing new audiences.
However, if you take a considered approach to grow your professional service business, this growth strategy can be a highly effective way to increase business for your professional services firm.
3. Know which services have the largest profit margins
While securing new business for all of your services will grow your professional services firm, to get the maximum return for your time and effort it can be a good idea to focus on the services that are the most profitable for your business.
Such services are the backbone of your business and are also your most efficient source of revenue, so it makes good business sense to upsell those services wherever possible.
Being aware of which services are giving you greater profitability and which are not, will allow you to make the right decisions in pursuit of profitability. By tracking the hours you and your team put into delivering certain services and measuring that against the budget for each project, you will be able to determine if it is worth continuing to offer certain services. This can be crucial in order to grow your business.
4. Invest in market research and analysis
As a diligent small business owner, there’s a very good chance that you know your target market very well. However, sometimes in business we don’t know what we don’t know, which means getting some outside perspective may provide fresh new insights that you may not have been aware of.
This is where investing in target market research may prove insightful for your professional services business. Market research can help you to gain new perspective about your target audience and their motivations, frustrations and goals. It can also help you to challenge your assumptions about your audience, after which you may adjust your marketing activities and your approach to growing your professional services firm.
5. Become an astute financial manager
Management of funds is a subject that requires level-headedness to ensure the available budget is carefully considered before funds are allocated and spent. It is the biggest factor that every business relies on for business development. Financial management goes hand in hand with planning because it is the unit that executes the agreed business plans. As such, becoming an astute financial manager will contribute to growing your professional services firm.
6. Develop new distribution channels
By partnering with complementary professional service firms, you can broaden your reach through new distribution channels. For example, your professional services firm may partner with a trade association or a small business owners association to gain access to their membership. Or a law firm may partner with an accounting firm and share referrals back and forth. The key to making this work for both parties is finding the right fit, which may require a little more due diligence than usual.
7. Have your business circumstances changed recently?
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