Entrepreneurs love speed. Scale fast and get big. Do it quickly and maybe you can even sell your accounting firm.

While speed is not the enemy, the result can be detrimental to your firm if not managed well. If you are like many firms, speed is not a problem. Few firms have penetrated a market so deeply that they are inundated with leads and new clients. It’s the state of entrepreneurship in the accounting profession.

Since many firms don’t have too many leads and don’t have to worry about speed in scaling, they can safely continue along making the most of the leads they can get through referrals.

But for firms that are on a faster pace of growth, managing your speed well can be the key to scaling your firm well.

In this case, let’s use the metric of year-over-year top line revenue growth of at least 25% or more to define ‘speed’.

First, let’s define a firm

A firm provides service to clients. Accounting and advisory firms offer a high-powered deliverable created by smart people. The work of financial advisory, assurance, and complex tax services is done by smart people that are trained well, follow processes that create valuable consistency, and also care about the mission of the firm (whether the team is offshored or local).

So ultimately, a firm is built around a team doing its best work. A major part of any innovative and modern accounting firm is their commitment to technology to assist in doing their work well. If you offer complex services, you know the value of having amazing software for a team that you’ve trained well.

Recommended reading: The essential questions to ask when building your accounting firm’s ideal tech stack

Your people are your key to growth

Embedded in the definition of a firm above is the fact that firm growth and scaling is a highly complex and people-focused business. Some firms do it well, and some struggle to do it well.

You know how hard it is to hire a team, train that team over a period of months or years, and then to practice the delivery of services to clients over and over. Sometimes client delivery may not go so well, so we all have to grow and mature in our abilities to deliver, learn, train others, and change our processes of delivery.