How ICB Business Insight can help you keep clients and earn more from them

By Steven Nash ICB ICB, ICB Level 4

For any freelancer offering a service to businesses, there is always a worry that – seemingly out of nowhere – a client will one day email you to say ‘we no longer need you.’ But how can the Business Insight course help cut the risk of that happening?

What is the ICB Business Insight course?

The ICB Level 4 Business Insight course is basically a version of Management Accounting tailored specifically for bookkeepers and the type of client bookkeepers work with.

A lot of Management Accounting topics and the examples in the course material are about dealing with large corporations that are turning over tens of millions of pounds per year.

That’s not a representative example of the type of client that most bookkeepers work with.

Most bookkeepers work with small or micro-entities and so the syllabus has been designed to help you offer a service that is relevant to those clients – and offers them real value.

How you can cut the risk of losing a client

By building a strong relationship between you and your client you can reduce the risk of losing them. You need to make yourself indispensable. But building a strong relationship isn’t easy when you’re just offering the core bookkeeping services. Because although the client knows these things need to be done, they are not interested in them.

Clients are interested in their business. They want to know how to improve it, how to boost profitability, and how to avoid cash flow problems.

That’s where Business Insight comes in.

Think about the amount of knowledge you are building up about your client’s business. Those numbers can tell a story – and not just about past performance, but about what the business could do in the future.

There’s a great example in this video by Peter Stewart from the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers. He compares the core bookkeeping tasks to being in a speedboat and looking at the ripples of water at the back which show where the boat has been. But turn around and face the front and you may find you’re confronted by an Iceberg. That’s the difference between just calculating the numbers and analysing them to help steer a safe course for the business.