From Scrappy to Smart: The Brave New Rules for Growing Your Business
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You can hustle your way to your first million. But what happens when the long hours, full client roster, and never-ending admin start to strangle your firm? Brannon Poe of Poe Group Advisors has a wake-up call for SMEs: stop doing more and start thinking differently.
In a candid chat with Accounting Today's Dan Hood, Poe lays out the uncomfortable truth most practice owners avoid: what got you here won't get you there.
The Art of Letting Go
At the startup stage, growth is about saying yes to everything. Need clients? Say yes. Need money? Work Saturdays. But once you hit that 6-8 person team and cross the R1 million revenue mark, the rules change. Growth becomes less about adding work and more about letting go.
Let go of low-value clients. Let go of doing all the billable work yourself. Let go of being the only one who knows how to do things. And let go of the mindset that says "more hours = more growth."
Building the Right Capacity is Key
Poe's advice? Build capacity before you chase more clients. That means hiring smart, pruning aggressively, and using tools like the "three-bucket method" (keep, delegate, drop) to stop your team from drowning in tasks. And yes, take a proper vacation. No laptop. No emails. Just headspace.
If you're burnt out, you’re not alone. Poe recalls one owner who wanted to sell his firm out of exhaustion. After a proper break and a strategic client purge, he reinvented his practice and stayed in the game with a new vision.
Want to grow smart?
Consider these:
Raise your prices. Clients rarely leave, and you buy back your sanity.
Specialise. Clear niches attract premium clients.
Avoid deadweight partnerships. Give decision power only to those who drive progress.
Market strategically. Even if you’re full, the right marketing gets you the right clients.
Are you running your practice or is it running you? It might be time to change the rules. Take a leaf from Brannon Poe's playbook and build the kind of firm that gives you freedom, not just fees.
Tag your fellow SME warriors who need this reminder. Or better yet, nominate someone for our next feature on accounting game-changers.
