We expect to get things fast these days. When we can get a product signed, sealed and delivered to our door on the same day we ordered it, we become more and more conditioned to on-demand services.
There’s a lot of advice and information online about how to reduce your lead times. Many people believe that the client experience is negatively impacted when a company is slow to move.
The advice isn’t wrong. We’re all about helping our clients to get what they want fast. That being said, we make it very clear to prospects at the point of inquiry, that there’ll be an eight week preparation time before we take them on as a client.
Why?
We believe in being effective and efficient
We’re big believers in efficiency. This isn’t your grandfather’s bookkeeping, remember? You should be able to collaborate with us in real time, not wait until the end of the year to hear from us.
We preach the value of instant access to your numbers, because we really believe in the control it gives you over your business. We introduce our clients to the best time-saving apps, because it makes sense to keep improving the efficiency of your processes, so you’re not wasting time.
We designed our website to enable potential clients to find answers to their questions and make decisions with clarity and without delay.
But we’re also big believers in effectiveness first. Everything we do has to have a purpose. We make sure we’re doing things for the right reasons, before we figure out how fast we can do them.
It’s more effective in the long run, to cover all bases first
We’d be doing you a disservice if we rushed through the proposal process without really assessing where you’re at in your business, what you really need, and how ready you are.
That involves:
- Making sure we’re a good match – We wrote a blog recently about our content marketing journey where we talk about how important it is that we’re taking on clients that are the right fit. It’s important to us that we work with business owners who align with our values and respect the way we operate. And it’s important to you too! You want to know that the bookkeeper you work with is the right match for you.
- Gaining a real understanding of your business – and following up with any preparation and planning into the services you’ll need.
- Conducting a Xero health check – we don’t take on any new Xero clients without checking in on the health of your accounts. We want to be sure we catch any issues before they cause long term damage. On the back of the healthcheck we identify what needs fixing.
- Identifying any tidy-ups we may need to do – or any backlog we have to catch up on. This could include miscoded items, unreconciled banks, unreconciled control accounts (e.g Stripe bank accounts which are ‘holding’ accounts and are notoriously wrong in Xero) Missing payroll journals. It could be literally anything – we have seen it all!
- Making sure our proposal is specific to your needs – Sometimes what you think you need isn’t what you truly need, so we take the time to look into your accounts and do the right kind of preparation. That way, we can best help you, and best help ourselves to do our best work.
- Getting you ready! – We have a Fresh Financials way of doing things (The Fresh Approach). We want to make sure you know how everything is going to work when you partner with us, so we’re starting on a successful footing from day one.
Sometimes clients come to us, they’re the value fit and everything is in order with their accounts. In these cases they’re inquiring because they’ve been disappointed with the service from their previous accountant, and they’ve heard good things about us. Such cases may be the odd occasion where we divert from our eight week lead time. Otherwise, we’re just making sure you’re at the same level before we hit go.
Our prospects don’t always need speed, but they do need clarity
What we’ve realised more and more as we work with business owners, is that they’re not always looking to rush in and start tomorrow. They’re mostly looking for help understanding what they need, and what it will look like for us to help. They’re looking for the clarity and honesty they haven’t experienced before. Just like Rome, trust isn’t built in a day – and your trust is more important to us than a rushed lead time.
If you are ready to get this process started, and you like the sound of building a more effective and efficient business, you can start at stage one today by filling out a quick questionnaire.