Self-assessment, limited company accounts, VAT, payroll, advisory. Trust earns the work. Compass builds the marketing that grows the practice, times it to the tax calendar, and surfaces the professional-body rules as the copy approaches them. Try Compass today with a free 90 day growth plan.
You run a small practice or a solo bookkeeping book, and the work comes from trust and word of mouth. The big four and the consolidators have the brand and the budget. Your wedge is the relationship, the responsiveness, the local knowledge, and a specialism in a vertical like restaurants, trades, ecommerce, or contractors. The marketing job is to be the first practice a founder thinks of when they need an accountant, and to specialise in a way that earns referrals. The trouble is the time: the marketing waits while you serve clients, and it disappears entirely in the January crunch.
Most marketing advice assumes a budget, a spare afternoon, and a team, rather than one accountant running the practice and the marketing. It ignores the professional-body constraints that shape what an accountant can say, so the generic playbook feels risky as well as ill-fitting. The lead-generation tactics it pushes sit awkwardly in a profession built on trust and discretion. It ends in relying on the referrals that happen to come, watching a better-marketed practice win the clients you would have served better, and never quite finding the time to fix it.
Most AI tools take the marketing off your hands and produce generic copy, when a small practice wins on trust and a clear specialism. Compass works the other way: it pairs the speed of AI with coaching and plain steps, and surfaces the rules where your copy approaches them, so the marketing sounds like you and helps you keep your marketing within ICAEW and ACCA guidance.
What that looks like for a practice:
- Specialism positioning. Restaurants, trades, ecommerce, contractors, charities, healthcare. The specialism is the wedge; Compass helps you sharpen the focus and lead with it. - Local search foundations. Your Google Business Profile with the right category, accurate hours, and team photos, plus the local-intent terms clients search ("accountant [town]", "small business accountant [area]", "self-assessment help [town]"). Compass walks you through the spec. - Educational content cadence. The tax-deadline reminder, the budget summary, the Making Tax Digital guide, on LinkedIn where founders find you and in a monthly email that proves the expertise, without breaching any one client's confidentiality. - Referral systems. Past clients and adjacent professionals (solicitors, mortgage advisors, financial planners) are the strongest source; Compass specs the partnership framework. - Professional-body-aware copy. Compass surfaces the ICAEW and ACCA constraints where the copy approaches them and flags for a final human check before campaigns go live.
Ten to twenty minutes of quick questions about your practice: the services you offer, your specialism, who your clients are, where you already appear online. While you answer, Compass researches your local market and nearest competing practices and surfaces what it finds for you to confirm or correct.
The free 90 Day Growth Plan lands first: a single on-screen plan with the truth about your local market, the clients most worth pursuing, the moments that turn an enquiry into an instruction, and a 90 day roadmap. Pro turns it into a full 12-month strategy timed to the tax calendar, from the January self-assessment crunch to April year-end and the autumn budget.
A short daily task list with the marketing science behind each one explained in plain English. Compass handles some tasks in the background, like listings monitoring; the rest are one clear move at a time, with the ICAEW and ACCA constraints surfaced where the copy approaches them.
Winning the right clients is what the big firms drill as marketing science: positioning, specialism, and the psychology of who a business owner trusts with their numbers. Compass applies it within the ICAEW and ACCA rules and names the reason behind each task in plain English, so the craft stays with you.
Pro Plan subscription £19 per month for as long as you stay.