Riches In The Niches: Here's Why Accountants Should Specialize
Are you thinking about whether you should keep your accounting skills and spectrum broad, to attract as many clients as possible - or niche, to appeal to a more specialist crowd?
Well, Catching Clouds founders Scott and Patti Scharf are big fans of the niche.
Here’s why.
The Early Days of Catching Clouds
Catching Clouds was founded by husband and wife duo Patti and Scott Scharf. Scott, a self-proclaimed IT geek, and Patti, a CPA, power user, and database writer.
Over ten years ago, Patti went to an accounting conference, and afterward, she called Scott excitedly, proclaiming,
“The cloud is here!”
Followed by…
“If I build this business, will you help me?”
The duo knew from the beginning that their business would center around accounting, and leveraging the expanding technology available in the space. With the name Catching Clouds in place, they were ready for their first clients.
The first client of Catching Clouds was an Amazon seller, followed by another and another. They quickly recognized that ecommerce accounting was complex, particularly for sellers with little to no experience - but there weren’t many specialists around at the time.
The Journey to Specialization
Catching Clouds’ mindset was always that they would choose a niche.
Scott often says there are:
“Riches in the niches”
Why should you form a niche in your business? How does this help you?
The Scharfs explained that once they made the statement, “we serve ecommerce and ecommerce only”, it simplified many things for them. It helped with providing clear messaging, content creation, and SEO marketing.
Choosing the ecommerce niche of cloud accounting allowed Scott and Patti to say “no”, which gave them space and availability to commit to the clients they could work with, helping them provide outstanding service.
The niche developed as Catching Clouds grew.
Initially, the team took on smaller businesses. Still, many of these would go out of business within a year, so Catching Clouds decided that they were no longer going to onboard smaller businesses.
This didn’t mean they weren’t going to help them.
Scott and Patti put in a CRM system so that if a client is making less than $50k in revenue, they are sent an automated email with courses, YouTube resources, and all of the great content they have created. Once they exceeded that $50k threshold, the team would reach out.
From here, Catching Clouds has grown and merged with Acuity.
This relationship allowed Catching Clouds to scale further and provide more flexibility to their business with teams of specialists focusing on different niches.
Have you created a niche for your business? How did this come to be?
