If you’re a large firm refugee and you’ve been running your own accounting practice for a year or two, this might feel familiar….
The excitement of starting your own firm has passed. The first clients arrived, many through relationships you’d built over many years. Your practice is established, you’re busy and, from the outside, everything appears to be going rather well.
Yet something has changed.
Most of the obvious conversations have already happened. Former colleagues have introduced the people they were going to introduce. The goodwill that helped you get started has largely done its work. You’re no longer asking, Can I build a practice? Instead, you’re asking, How do I build a better one?
And, if you’re honest, it can feel more isolated than you expected.
The first phase is different
Those early years are often supported by assets you built long before you became a practice owner.
Your reputation. Your experience. Your professional relationships. The trust you’ve earned over many years. Those things matter, and there’s nothing wrong with drawing on them. In fact, it would have been surprising if you hadn’t.
But they are, by their nature, finite.
Eventually, every independent practitioner reaches the point where those original relationships have largely done their job. The referrals become less frequent, not because you’ve done anything wrong, but because you’ve already had most of the obvious conversations.
That’s when the question changes.
You’re no longer trying to prove you can build a practice. You’re trying to decide what sort of practice you want to build over the next decade.
From that point onwards, you’re relying less on what you brought with you and more on what you’re building now.
The work that matters isn’t always visible
The outcomes are easy to recognise. A new client signs an engagement letter. An invoice is paid. A referral arrives. They’re visible, measurable and reassuring.
The work that creates those outcomes is usually much less obvious.
It’s making time for conversations that may not lead anywhere today. It’s refining the way you deliver your services. It’s becoming clearer about the type of clients you genuinely want to work with. It’s investing in better systems. It’s improving your cash flow, even when there’s client work waiting to be done.
None of those activities feels particularly significant this week.
Yet they’re often the things that quietly determine where the practice will be in a year or two.
The challenge nobody expects
There’s another transition that many accountants underestimate before they leave a large firm.
The firm didn’t just provide clients, systems and a recognised name. It also provided people.
Colleagues to test ideas with. Partners who had encountered similar challenges. Informal conversations that helped make sense of difficult decisions.
Most of us were happier without the internal politics. Few miss the appraisal process or the timesheets.
What many do miss is having intelligent peers who understand the particular challenges of leading a professional practice. Not because they can solve every problem, but because they ask better questions, challenge assumptions and help you see beyond the issue immediately in front of you.
It’s one of the reasons many of the accountants I have mentored use me much as they once relied on a trusted partner in their old firm. Not for answers, but for perspective. We explore ideas, challenge assumptions and think through the consequences of different choices before they commit themselves.
Often they already know the answer. They’re experienced professionals with sound instincts. But they’re also experienced enough to know that good judgement improves when it’s tested. They don’t assume they’ll always make the right decision simply because they’re now the owner.
That’s a habit worth holding on to because, the further you move from a large firm, the fewer opportunities there are for those conversations to happen by accident.
Building something that lasts
Building a successful practice has never been simply about technical competence or winning more work. Those things matter, of course, but they’re only part of the picture.
The longer I spend talking to sole practitioners, whether they operate alone or with a team, the more convinced I become that one of the biggest differentiators is the quality of their thinking. And that rarely develops in isolation.
Looking back, as so many of the 80+ accountants I’ve interviewed on my podcast, have confirmed, most successful firms weren’t transformed by one dramatic breakthrough. They evolved because their owners kept improving. They developed better systems. Built new relationships. Became more selective about the work they accepted. Made clearer decisions about where they wanted the practice to go.
None of those decisions felt particularly dramatic at the time.
Perhaps that’s the real difference between starting a practice and building one.
Starting often depends on the career you’ve already had.
Building something enduring depends on the decisions you make once that advantage begins to fade.
