How To Spread The News About Your Growing Team And Establish Boundaries With Your Existing Clients
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When you start to grow your team, you’ll need to set boundaries with your existing clients. As your firm grows, it’s super important to be transparent with the people who trust you with their books!
Because when you’re able to communicate your boundaries with clarity, you’re setting realistic expectations for everyone involved. It’s ESPECIALLY true when you have a team who’s helping you execute client work!
When I started my very first bookkeeping and tax firm, I was running it all by myself with no intentions of hiring a team. But then I got busier and wanted to scale! So I ended up hiring contractors to support me and increase my capacity for serving clients.
When I co-founded my second firm, I knew right away that we were going to take a few extra steps to establish and enforce boundaries with our clients! It’s so much easier to create a healthy work/life balance when you’re clearly communicating boundaries with your clients AND your team.
And if you’re wondering how to go about establishing boundaries with your existing clients, you’re in the right place! We actually get this question all the time — because firm owners want to start building a team, start to scale, and reach their goals.
Especially our students in Breakthrough for Bookkeepers & Accountants who want to seriously level up their game and set up their whole business to run like a well-oiled machine (and potentially remove themselves completely).
But if you’ve been running your firm solo until now OR you haven’t really established boundaries yet, keep reading to learn my three top tips for making that shift!
Three Ways to Communicate Boundaries to Your Existing Clients
Whoop whoop! Your firm is growing and you're working hard to build a dream team that supports you. But what happens when you need to tell your existing clients that you're not the only one behind the curtain anymore?
A lot of our students have some fear around having that conversation with their clients:
“What if they get mad and leave me for another bookkeeper?”
“What if they refuse to start communicating with my team instead of me?”
“How do I even bring it up?”
These are all valid concerns, but honestly…
If a client tells me they don’t want my team to work on their account or that they’ll only communicate with me, they’re not a good fit for my firm. Because if I’m doing ALL the work in my firm, eventually I’ll get burnt out and reach a ceiling of how much work I can do by myself.
But with a team, you have a built-in checks and balances system which results in wayyyy fewer mistakes and missed deadlines!
Draft a quick email
When a team member starts taking over your client work or administrative tasks, you’ll need to notify your clients to stay transparent with them. You can do this by sending off a quick email to let them know that things are changing (for the better) and that you’re updating your policies and procedures. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just a brief note to get them up to speed.
Here’s a few things to include in the email:
The fact that your firm is growing and now you have a team supporting you with XYZ
The info for their new point of contact (like if you moved to a support@yourdomain.com instead of name@yourdomain.com
How they can easily change your contact information in their phone/email provider (you could even take the extra step and include a Loom video)
A reminder of your business hours and expected response times
Finish off the email letting them know what to do if they have any questions about these changes!
Introduce your team
In the email, on social media, and even on your website, you can celebrate your team members and welcome them to the crew! Even if you’re still the “face” of the company, highlighting your team members’ expertise and skills will help your clients feel more comfortable with the change. If you plan to delegate client work to a team member, have them tag along to the next client meeting and make an introduction — especially if you plan to have that team member take ownership of that account in the future!
Revamp your contract
We highly recommend reaching out to a legal team like LegalZoom or Rocket Lawyer to draft your client agreements. And one thing we like to include in our contracts is a clause that says we’re allowed to outsource client work to team members at any given time. This protects us just in case a client gets upset that their account isn’t handled by me personally!
Your Journey to The Firm of Your Dreams Isn’t Far Away
If you read this blog thinking, “I’d LOVE to start scaling my firm, but I’m not sure where to start!” — we’ve totally got you!
TONS of our students in Breakthrough for Bookkeepers & Accountants are right there on the cusp of hiring their first team member. And we get to guide them through the process so they don’t have to experience the same trial and error we did!
And there’s also a place for you in Breakthrough for Bookkeepers & Accountants if you already have a team and need help learning to effectively delegate and transform your star team members into leaders! We built this program for firm owners with big dreams for their business, so if that’s you…
Join us in Breakthrough!
