One of the worries that most new bookkeepers and accountants have when they start trying to start a speaking program as part of their practice building is how to get speaking engagements.

Unlike making a cold sales call, making a cold call on an organization or club is a piece of cake. Most all activity directors or meeting coordinators are starved for ideas about what to do or present at their next meeting. Think about it, they’re human just like you and they’re limited by their exposure and experience.

You, on the other hand, are not trying to “get something form them,” you are solving the problem of what to do at the next luncheon or dinner meeting.

Today is the first day of 2009 and here I finally join in with most every other guru wannabe and make the obligatory first of the year post. Ain’t it great?

For the past few days I have been getting organized. My next task is to set some goals, and start acquiring members, so I can afford to hire coders to complete some of the projects for the members. Being retired means I don’t need a lot of cash to live on and can afford to plow most of it back into the membership, but it also means I can’t do a lot of spending from my own resources because at this stage in life I want to hang onto what I set aside. Sort of a “Catch-22″ type situation.

So, as of today, I have committed to a daily blog post of some sort, an article or two about the membership site, and a few other things to let people know about the site. Pretty much using the online version of what I espouse for local practitioners.

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.