At Crisp Accountancy, we are reaching a point where I find myself questioning how many people we will need to hire over the next 12-24 months. We still have very ambitious growth plans, but the idea of hiring staff in direct proportion to the number of new clients we take on is not particularly appealing.

Hiring is costly, finding the right people is challenging, and the process is incredibly time-consuming.

We will still need to hire over the next year, but at a slower rate than our growth. How? We plan to double our Revenue Per Employee (RPE) over the next three years.

How am I planning on doubling RPE?

Increasing RPE is all about improving your efficiencies. Depending on your business's current state, you can use many tactics to do this.

Here are the main factors I have been and continue to work on:

Pricing

Simplistically, increasing your pricing and receiving more revenue for the same amount of work will instantly boost your RPE. Most businesses do not get their pricing right, so this is usually the first point of call.

This can include focussing on a niche to charge a premium to others in the market.

We at Crisp have worked very hard on our pricing over the last few years, and I am happy with our current state.

Remember though, pricing is never done, it is needs to be constantly reviewed, tweaked and improved!

High-Value Services

Focusing on higher-value services should result in more revenue for the time spent and, therefore, a boost to your RPE.

You have to check that the higher-value services aren’t taking you a lot longer to deliver, though. Sometimes, scope creep can cause issues when you first start to work on shifting your services up the value chain.

Also, some lower-value work can lead to a great RPE if fully automated; more on that shortly.

At Crisp, we have always focused on being more than just a basic compliance accountant. We have worked hard on refining and improving this offer over the last two years and are now really focusing on it even further this year.

One to Many Services

Traditionally, accountancy services are delivered on a one-to-one basis. One accountant or bookkeeper works with one client, delivering the service at a time.

No matter how well you price your services and how efficient your team are, this is still a slow way to grow. It’s why you don’t see service businesses experiencing explosive growth in the same way you do tech companies (unless they are buying up other firms).

If you can reach many clients at once using the same amount of time then you can very quickly grow your RPE and boost your bottom line.

We are already experimenting with group services, and they will form a larger part of our plan moving forward.

We can offer a lower price point to businesses who would otherwise be priced out but still deliver a much greater amount of revenue for that time.

For example, we are already running group business planning sessions, group profit accelerators, and paid-for seminars for large audiences.

Other things you could consider in your businesses are membership subscriptions, masterminds, etc.

Taking this a step further is the ability to service an unlimited amount of clients with no extra time commitment for your people. This is where we have seen a boom in online courses being created. You can see the appeal. One-time effort to create the course and then just the ongoing marketing effort to promote it (as if it is that easy, haha).

We have had a few courses mapped out for years. However, this is not a main part of our business, and we will launch only when it really complements everything else we are doing. This is close now, so watch this space!

Technology and Automation

Leveraging technology and using automation to allow your team to deliver quicker and more efficient services plays a huge part in boosting your RPE.

From day one at Crisp, we have focused on systems, automation, and leveraging technology to give us a competitive edge.

Since the first accountancy business I founded 13 years ago, we have always been 100% cloud accounting. In 2024, that’s not very impressive, but back then, very few firms could say that.

We were very early adopters of Loom (video recorder), using it back in 2017 and embedding it into every aspect of our business. It became a part of our culture very quickly.

Now we have AI readily available at our fingertips…

Custom GPT’s

We have built 3 custom GPT’s that we are currently using internally.

I have been asked a lot about this already, so let me walk you through how we built and used them—it was very simple!

Using Open AI’s ChatGPT, we upgraded to the team's account. Yes, it’s more money, but that cost is peanuts compared to the value we get!

The teams account allows us to create custom GPT’s and share these internally, it also allows us to share chat threads internally between the team.

Importantly, any conversations you have with the GPTs on the team plan are not used to train the wider language model, so we can be confident about confidentiality. On the free or standard paid plan, everything you type feeds the language model and, in theory, could end up in the public domain.

Creating the GPT is very simple. Write the prompts instructing how to respond, where to get information, and the overall purpose, all of which are prompted by the questions they ask you.

Then, the really important part, upload as many documents as you can to it’s knowledge centre that gives it the information it needs to know about you and your business.

Marketing Bots

Two of the GPTs we have created are marketing bots: one to focus on the Crisp brand and the other on my personal brand.

We uploaded:

• Brand guidelines

• Sales funnels

• Client avatars

• Client Journey

• Content pillars

• Tone of voice guide

• Marketing Messaging

• Blogs we had written

• My books

• My Key Note talks

And much more…

You can then use the bot to help you create and refine more of this custom knowledge and re-upload it to the GPT to constantly improve the bot.

These Marketing Bots now allow us to really speed up every aspect of our marketing, giving us a far greater output per person in the team.

Operations Bots

We also have a GPT that has all of our operational knowledge uploaded to it: our processes, our technical guidance, and questions we have been asked by clients and answered.

This can greatly improve the team's knowledge outside of their direct role, and it plays a large part in our training plans.

For example, the talks I give to business owners are recorded, fed into an AI transcript programme, and uploaded to the bot. The team can then ask questions about improving the business's performance, and it will respond with answers I would have given myself at talks, in my books, or in my blogs.

We are especially well positioned to leverage AI in this way as we have been working on our store of internal knowledge for years in the form of detailed playbooks. AI now allows us to leverage and share that information in a supercharged fashion.

In the accounting world, there are questions that have a black-and-white answer, but there are also a lot of areas where that answer is grey, and opinion forms a large part of the answer we give. Ask 5 different accountants the same question, and you could get 5 different answers.

This provides a huge challenge in an accountancy business. We want to make sure our team are providing consistent answers and advice and that they do not vary from person to person. The clients need consistency, and from a risk perspective, as an owner, I want to control the interpretation of technical answers.

Up to now, that involved a huge effort in training and monitoring, and even then, you could never really control it. Now, with the operations bot, the team have a consistent guide.