How To Grow Your Personal Service Business

Many people set up their own businesses because they become dissatisfied working for others. They find the freedom rewarding even if the committment is greater. For some the story does not end here and the desire to build a bigger and more profitable organisation never goes away.

Each world wide organisation was at some time in its history a small business. Very often this would be a person with a trade wanting to work for themselves. This is as true for Bill Gates before Microsoft as it is for an accountant leaving a large firm to service his local clientele.

As a skilled person, whether it be in accountancy, plumbing or information technology, when you want to work for yourself you must be happy that you can win jobs and look after the administration of the business. This can be a daunting task at first, but many find that they have a better gift for winning work and organising their affairs than they have even doing the work itself! These people will see more money to be made by employing technical and support staff to do the day to day work while they strive to bring in new customers and manage the business.

If we take the example of an accountant, it is easy to see the driving factors behind this progression. The successful, dynamic and entrepreneurial person will no doubt have reached a reasonably senior position within the accounting profession by the time he or she feels that working for others is too constraining. A good quality lifestyle will be expected and they will know the sorts of fees that need to be charged to achieve this working for themselves.

They will soon realise that their time is too valuable to be spent undertaking administrative work. They are better employed charging the clients the high hourly rate. Therefore there is very quickly an incentive to employ a secretary. Similarly, much of the routine technical work could be done by a less experienced accountant and the need for a junior assistant is recognised. As the enthusiastic business owner builds up the business even further he may begin to realise that more efficiency could be gained if additional staff spent time sharing his duties of winning work and supervising junior staff.

Eventually he will have recruited at more senior levels and even invited junior partners to join him in owning the business. It will not be long before the entrepreneur ceases doing any accounting whatsoever and spends all of the time on strategic management such as negotiating mergers and acquisitions of other accounting firms and thus growing the business even more!


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Mark Jenner is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, a Certified Fraud Examiner and has a Masters Degree in Fraud Management. He advises on home business opportunities and profitable home business leads