Does your agency settle for an accountant who helps you stay compliant? One that simply keeps the books, file taxes and meet the obligations that the government has for businesses and taxpayers.
Accountancy firms grow on the back of that fear. Making it actually quite easy to win business if you’re an accountancy firm.
But as your agency grows, you will need more from your accountant.
What does your agency need?
When I worked in firms before MAP, I became very frustrated at how little value we gave to business owners. We were so busy keeping the wheels turning. However much we wanted to make a difference to our clients’ businesses, we just didn’t have the resources to do it. In the last firm that I worked for we had just 12 staff servicing 800 clients. MAP has 24 (double the number of staff) serving just 135 clients.
Our staff to client ratio has therefore dropped from 67 clients to 1 staff member to 6 clients to 1 staff member.
This gives our team the time and space to think about our clients, to focus on finding opportunities for them and to really get in the trenches to make things happen.
When cloud accounting came along it enabled accountants to have better visibility of their clients’ finances. Transactions can be processed faster and more easily and therefore data can be produced and reported on more regularly. Some firms used this advantage to save money and drop their prices.
With more reliable data, we can glean more insights into what’s actually happening in your business and share those insights back with you and have productive conversations about the development of your business.
We wanted to make the most of the opportunity to give more value. Accounting is backwards-looking. It’s about getting the numbers right and reporting them to the relevant people. Finance takes that information and tells the story about what’s actually happening in your business and helps you to make informed and smart decisions to make growing your business easier.
Having access to reliable data is only part of the equation
In order to get insights, we need to understand the business and the environment it operates in. Without knowing what good looks like, we can’t work towards getting there.
As we work exclusively with digital creative agencies, we get to see and compare hundreds of businesses operating in the same sector. We see the makeup of these agencies and can quickly identify where they might be getting it right and where they might be getting it wrong.
At MAP we draw on our experience working across the sector. We use that position to work with the Managing Director and senior leadership team to set, challenge and implement a financial strategy. That ultimately supports the vision of the founders.
We, therefore, work with people who are ambitious, commercial minded and constantly on the hunt to find the weaknesses in their business and strengthen them.
We’re not for everyone. If you are looking for a cheap, hands-off service and all you need is the books keeping up to date, to keep the taxman happy. Then we’re not a fit for you.
If, on the other hand, you want to build a scalable and committed finance function who are connected to your vision for your agency, then MAP might be just what you are looking for.
The people that get the best from MAP are those that see finance as integral to the strategy. Not as an administrative burden. They discuss key business decisions with us, and engage fully in the relationship with us as their finance team.
MAP will work best for you if you want a firm who:
- Understands your industry, works with other businesses just like yours and shares the patterns we observe
- Is at the forefront of the technology in your industry to streamline financial processes. Provides access to better quality data and ultimately gives you telling insights to grow your company the right way
- Aligns the finance strategy to the business vision. Which helps to devise plans to take the company to where you want it to go
- Works closely with its clients to solve problems and move the business forward
The next steps for your agency
If you’re a business owner and you want to build a scalable and committed finance function connected to your vision for your agency, then MAP might be just what you are looking for. So, what are you waiting for? Book in a call to discover what that could look like for your agency.
