Most practice owners know they need to engage in marketing their practice. However, the first step to being able to market your practice, is to first and foremost, have a strong enough desire to grow your practice.

Many practice owners are so heavily involved in servicing their clients, that they have little time or energy to work on generating new business. They are also often hesitant to hire staff to take over some of the burden of work, which of course automatically limits their capacity for growth.

So here are some reasons (“motives”) to break through the growing pains and expand your practice:

i. To target more of the work you like to do, which increases your personal sense of fulfillment/job satisfaction;

ii. To increase the value of your practice for the purposes of sale;

iii. Growth increases the options of how a practice can be transitioned e.g. you can transition internally because you have enough work to have someone on staff who could be your succession plan. It also means that even if that staff person is not interested in buying you out, the fact that they have client relationships, and will go with the practice on a sale, will make your practice more attractive to a potential purchaser.

iv. To increase revenues/profits – self-evident, of course!

v. Increased revenues also mean you can afford higher quality staff, or perhaps that fulltime person that you want, rather than a sometimes less committed part-timer(s). Quality staff can also provide you with more relief in areas of the practice that you don’t want to be mired down in e.g. less tax prep, more review; or less review work and more business consulting or other desired engagements.

There are problems associated with not growing your practice – just as there are with growing it. The question is which problem would you rather have – one that has more upside potential or one that gives you less of a reward?