By virtue of it being a tangible product, something your prospect can see, feel and touch, a printed newsletter shows the prospect that you are willing to put some time and effort into your relationship with them.

But, because it is a tangible product, it takes production time, and it takes money to create. Something that most startup practitioners have very little of to spare.

So, how do you maximize your production, while minimizing your expenses? Ah, the eternal question, posed by all Practice Builders.

Okay, I think it’s about time I said something about newsletters.

Now, I’m not talking about email newsletters here. Those are important, but as a practitioner concentrating on your local market, I feel that you will be a lot more competitive if you do the majority of your prospecting using traditional offline methods. Print methods.

What does it take to be a successful practice builder?

After you have established your goals and laid out your plan of action for reaching your goals, one of your next steps is to take control of yourself.

Remember all those guys in school who were so proud of their imagination, and were so quick to deprecate the plodders and the planners? Well, let me bring you back to reality with a corollary to the story of the tortoise and the hare. Consistency trumps all.

I learned a very valuable lesson from my mentor the other day about repurposing content, one of her favorite habits.

Now, I’ve heard lots of chit-chat on the internet about repurposing content, and I have consistently thought of it as rewriting the same old article or report in forty or fifty different ways. Sort of what the online bunch call “spinning” an article.

As I have tried to make abundantly clear to the members of my practice building tools website, as an “old, tired and ugly” retiree, I don’t keep up with a lot of accounting or tax law these days. But this little tidbit just slid across the desk in front of me and I thought it bore some further comment.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was related to goal setting. My mentor, repeated the often quoted phrase “if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never know when you get there.”

It’s not a great leap from that quote to the idea of trying to picture where you want your practice to be in five years. In today’s practice building environment, every effort you undertake, must be directed toward your eventual goal.

If you’re a typical bookkeeper or accountant trying to build your practice using the traditional methods of networking and referrals, you’re probably struggling day after day and not getting the results you need.

Your competition has probably already positioned themselves in your community as the small business “expert.” You see their name in every seminar announcement from the local community college, or in the newspaper as a speaker at almost every Rotary or Kiwanis club meeting. And you wonder how they did it. How did they position themselves as the “expert?”

Because they could not advertise, these “Rainmakers” used the skills lawyers are trained to use, writing and speaking. This came naturally; those lawyers are trained to write, things like briefs and contracts, and to speak, especially when arguing a case.

Financial professionals, such as accountants, were not so lucky. Their college training focused on how to add and subtract. Harsh as it may seem, accounting rules are basically rules of when to add and when to subtract from one side of the ledger to the other.

There are clubs and organizations in your community who actively seek speakers for their meetings and community activities. Organizations like community colleges, the local SBDC (Small Business Development Center) and chambers of commerce all seek outside speakers to fill their programs.

If you can give a good presentation, then your time as a volunteer speaker to these clubs and organizations will return practice development dividends far in excess of any other marketing activity you do, with the possible exception of writing articles and books and getting published.

One of the basic tools of the rainmaker system is the writing and using of articles. You’ll enjoy a lot of benefits by having an article printed in a business or professional publication, or even in your local newspaper. However there are some misconceptions about what it will do, and these misconceptions usually [...]