Does anyone know the best way to get hold of new business start up details without it costing the earth? Had quotes of 100 leads a month for around £70 per month? Or does anyone think they have a better way of generating a lot of new business? Thanks in advance.

Probably not much help but I chose my accountant through word of mouth and I believe most of his custom comes this way.

There are some websites where new businesses (or established businesses) after an accountant can put in their details and the details are then sent off to accountant companies who can then get in touch. Perhaps they have a similar thing for book keepers?

Yeah, i think word of mouth is the best way but unfortunately at the moment there arent too many mouths! Its like a chicken and egg situation

The Thomson Local does an annual membership for entries into your local directory. I had this for about 2-3 years and there was about 50 ish new start ups on the list every month. It cost about £600 a year. You get the main contact name, email, phone, address, business details, etc. You also get all the othr listings i.e. new entries but not new businesses, peole moving into the area from elsewhere, etc. so quite a big list in all.

When I first started up in business as an accountant I didn’t particularly want to do any cold calling myself (I’m just not good at hard selling) but I did want some choice about which businesses I wanted to target. I decided to try a telesales approach and did my telephone marketing in two stages.

First I bought a list of businesses from a company that let me specify things like postcode, turnover, years in business, number of employees etc. It cost me something like £200 for 500 names. I don’t want to recommend any particular company but google “business leads” and you should find plenty.

Then I found a telesales company that did the cold calling from my list and charged me something like £40 for each successful appointment made (you need to be very specific about what constitutes a “successful appointment”). The telesales company also cross-checked the names with the telephone preference services before calling – this is very important because cold calling someone who has registered on TPS can result in a heavy fine. Once again, google should find you a range of companies who do this type of work.

I reckon each new client cost me an average of about £100 to sign up – expensive to start with but if you keep the business it only costs you once.

You could save money by doing your own cold calling (but remember to cross check your names with TPS first) or by buying your mates a beer but good leads are worth paying for to get you off the ground.

Once you have a client base then provided you are good, referrals will reduce the need for external marketing. Good luck :)