When Chris Bell launched his business 10 years ago, he envisioned it as an accounting firm to compete with the ones he had worked for since college. However, when he quickly began to notice the gaps in services many of his clients were experiencing, his entrepreneurial strategy shifted.
“I quickly realized the delivery of services from a traditional accounting firm was not what I felt like our clients needed,” he said. “I see so often where the accounting firm would ask a few questions, get some information, generate some reports and send them to the client and the client would toss them in the box and go on about their day.
“I believe that as a CPA that we should be, as our profession so often tags, our client’s trusted business advisor.”
Bell rebranded the firm Complete Consulting in 2008 to reflect this comprehensive approach and set about developing a network of fellow professionals for referring clients who needed services outside of his company’s core expertise.
“We understand that we’re not a jack of all trades; we’re not an expert in every one of those areas,” Bell said. “But, we believe that we have a strong enough network that when those needs are brought to us, we can coordinate those services on behalf of our clients to ensure that they’re getting the best advice and the best service as it relates to those products.”
Bell has grown the company to 10 employees, specializing in entities receiving public funds as well as professionals such as doctors and lawyers. The company also has a growing tax practice serving individuals of all walks of life. He said marketing the firm has come through a combination of traditional sales, expanding services performed for existing clients and partnering with his church to present money management seminars within the community.
On this latter point, he said in addition to enhancing the company’s name recognition and improving participants’ financial skills, community outreach helps re-shape perception of the professional network overall.
“One of the things I’ve noticed is that individuals and small businesses typically do not engage [business] professionals on a regular basis,” he said. “When they have a legal matter they go online and ask Google to represent them. When they have a financial need, they go to a tax preparer or a bookkeeper or they even go to their spouse and try to have them to resolve those problems for them internally. Often they will not go to a professional until something is completely broken.
“What we want to do is encourage those same individuals, those same small businesses, to engage the professionals early, much like the larger corporations do.”