Читать книгу Start & Run a Bookkeeping Business - Angie Mohr - Страница 19

Before you start up your bookkeeping practice, take some time to assess who your competition will be. It won’t just be other bookkeeping practices, but also accounting firms, tax preparation outfits, and bookkeeping software companies who make it seem so easy for business owners to do their own bookkeeping.

Assess what your competitors do well and where they are weak. Is the bookkeeping practice across town offering a service guarantee? That may be a model you should adopt for your company. Is the accounting firm charging $75 per hour for bookkeeping with no added support to the client? Perhaps you can improve on that level of service.

The process of finding who your competitors are and what they’re doing is called competitive intelligence, and it is something every smart entrepreneur does on a continuous basis. It is simply the process of uncovering, analyzing, and presenting publicly available information on your business’s competitors in order to maintain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Here are the basic steps to learning more about your competitors.

(1) Identify the competition. Find out both who is competing directly with your services and who is competing for the same customer dollars.

(2) Analyze what they do right and what they do wrong. Assess the strengths and weaknesses of your identified competition.

(3) Determine how they are positioned to take advantage of opportunities. In this step, you will assess how well you think your competition could adjust to changes in their external environments, such as what might happen if they hired a tax expert.

(4) Assess how vulnerable your competition is to changing market conditions. How would your competition be able to handle external threats to their businesses, such as changing tax laws, legal action, new competitors, or theft — all things that are potential land mines for businesses that are not prepared.

(5) Consider how your business stacks up against the competition. Once you understand your competitors better, determine where you stand in relation to them based on the same criteria. Are there things you can improve in your business model to make your business stronger in the markets you serve?