Evan Carmichael advises someone launching an accounting and consulting firm to talk to potential clients first and focus on medium-sized growing businesses. He recommends branding your financial models as a secret weapon and partnering with government agencies for referrals and credibility.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael and welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's video, I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Dorem, who wrote in. I'll read his email. Hello Evan, I want to form a company which will provide accounting, auditing, consulting, payroll, and other services for small and medium enterprises. We will provide advice to clients by using financial and non-financial models which are not used very often. And the government is encouraging people to do their own businesses here. Please provide your suggestions. Thank you in advance. Regards, Dharam. So Dharam, some advice for you. Congratulations on wanting to set up your business. First of all, it's great news. What I would first do is start talking to potential customers and see where the need is and what they're willing to pay you for. The best way to build a business is around the customer. You have money coming in the door, you're solving a real problem. So start talking to some of these entrepreneurs and see how you might fit the mold. They may not need all your services, and you may find that one service does really well compared to the others. You'll probably find, you said you're going after small and medium companies, you'll probably find better success with the medium companies than the small, because a new entrepreneur doesn't need payroll services and doesn't need necessarily too much accounting services. They don't have staff, right? So why would you need payroll services if you don't have any staff? So your best bet is probably going to be with growing companies who don't have all the operational structure under them and can use your services to help them take them to the next level. The next thing I would try to do is focus on what is your unique value proposition. So what do you have to offer that nobody else has to offer? What makes you special? Because there's a lot of different accountants out there, right? So what is it that you're going to do that's different? And what intrigued me about your email is when you were saying you use financial and non-financial models that are not very frequently used. So what are those models? Can you brand them? Can you get people excited about them? And can you promote it as an entrepreneur's magic bullet, secret weapon that they can use to grow their business and beat their competitors because they're using these models that you've developed that other people haven't really taken into account. So thinking about how you're going to differentiate yourself and using some of those models might help you. The third bit of advice, you said that the government is really trying to encourage people to want to start their own business and get entrepreneurship up to the next level. I'm curious if there might be a way to use that and partner up with the government and have them introduce you to some of these entrepreneurs. If there's any government centers, if entrepreneurs are going to the government looking for help or resources, if you can get known as an expert for entrepreneurs and medium-sized businesses, then whenever these government agencies are seeing people coming in the door that need help, that are growing, that don't have the operational structure, and they see that they need somebody to help them with their payroll and accounting, then they can introduce you. So try to get in good spirits with the government workers and see if they might be able to help you, introduce you to to different entrepreneurs who might need your services. So I hope that helps. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up, and I'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you want to leave a comment below the video. Stay tuned for the next episode.
