Small businesses want help from accountants on strategic planning and financial forecasting. This word cloud represents a summary of popular responses from small businesses when we asked them this question:

“If you could get help in one area of your business right now, what would it be?”

Helping a client to build a more profitable and successful business is one of the most valuable things we can do. It would be crazy to price this work based on time—that would leave too much money on the table.

This article on website optimization is pulled from LivePlan’s Best Practice webinar on sales and marketing for your accounting firm. Our own marketing director John Procopio offers concrete advice for assessing your website, and he offers a two-step checklist for implementing changes.

Anyone who has been providing client services for a while has processes that they follow. But there is a difference between haphazard processes that have grown organically, and processes that are intentional, well-considered, and documented. The difference between the former and the latter is the difference between having a firm that is merely surviving, and one that is thriving.

There’s no doubt social media sites are marching forward in their quest to take over the rest of the internet. Once a repository for news feeds, career advice, and silly cat memes, social sites are now going toe-to-toe with more traditional channels for their share of the advertising and ecommerce spoils.

I am often asked during LivePlan training sessions: “When should I do a full business plan for my client, and how do I charge for it?” It’s a great question because it gets to the heart of advisory services.

Advisory services, done right, do not involve writing a traditional business plan.

One of my biggest challenges at Palo Alto Software is figuring out which ideas to pursue and which ideas to put on the back burner. I have the luxury of working with a bunch of really smart people, so new ideas for things that we could do come up all the time.

It’s business planning not accounting. Your projections, although they look like accounting statements, are just projections. They are always going to be off one way or another, and their purpose isn’t guessing the future exactly right, but rather setting down expectations and connecting the links between spending and revenue.

Being an accountant or a CPA also requires learning how to sell yourself and your firm’s services. Larger firms typically have someone responsible for marketing and business development, but smaller and one-person firms must know how to do it all if they want to compete and differentiate themselves.