Today I am presenting another written interview with Simon Harrisonch. Simon offers affordable and quality accounting services to all small businesses across the UK. His company is a low cost provider and their goal is to reduce small business accountancy fees. Check out his company site at http://www.cheaperaccountant.co.uk
1. What got you interested in offering accounting services? Share your story.
I’ve been working in accountancy for a large number of years now. I started within a small firm of accountants and then moved on to very senior positions within large commercial organisations. I always preferred working directly with clients and in particular enjoyed completing small business accountancy work. This made me think about offering accounting services through my own company and going back to where my real interests are. I now really enjoy what I do and I’m excited to be working with more and more small business clients each and every day.
2. What types of services does your company offer?
The company specialises in accounting services for small businesses and this is where our main expertise is held. We have been doing this for many years now and this has enabled the company to offer a full and complete range of accounting services to all of our clients nationwide. We offer the following services: Annual Company Accounts, Annual Returns to Companies House, PAYE and RTI submissions, VAT Returns, Self Assessment Tax Returns, Corporation Tax Returns, submissions to HMRC and Companies House, personal and company tax advice, accounting software guidance.
3. What are the biggest challenges you come across in your line of work?
The largest challenges are often reaching out to potential clients and getting our message across to small businesses. We don’t operate from a high street office and this means that we are less visual to an extent to small businesses. We fully market ourselves online and the largest challenge we face is encouraging business owners to move away from the traditional high street accountant and instead to work with an online accountant such as ourselves. The fee savings are huge and all small businesses can benefit from these reduced costs.
4. How have you gone about finding new clients and what’s working for you?
Since we operate online and our shop front is our website we do find that how many new clients we attract directly correlates with our positioning within Google for key search phrases. However, we can attribute a large part of the growth in client numbers to marketing via Twitter. We find that there are a large number of small businesses using Twitter on a daily basis and this makes it easy to reach out to these companies to make them aware of our services.
5. What are your future plans for 2015 and beyond?
We are very much focused on consolidating our position during 2015 so that we are able to aggressively compete with all of our competitors. The drive for 2015 is to be recognised as the number one provider within the cheap accountant niche and then to take this forward and maintain this position in future years. We will significantly ramp up our online marketing activities with a focus on the heavy production of quality content.
