Camley runs new business development for UK accountancy practices. We approach the businesses you actually want on the portfolio, so growth stops depending on referrals arriving by accident or on paying a multiple of GRF for somebody else's block of fees.
Four-week pilot, $400. No management fee until it works.
A practice is one of the few businesses where clients stay for a decade and new ones arrive almost by accident. Most partners can state their gross recurring fees to the pound. Very few can say where next year's new GRF is coming from, or name the twenty businesses they would most like on the portfolio.
Referrals are a by-product of your existing clients' own trading: you control neither the timing, the sector nor the fee band. Acquisition means paying up front, commonly between 0.8 and 1.5 times GRF depending on key person risk and how cloud native the ledger is, for a portfolio a retiring principal built, complete with the clients who never transfer and the write-offs you inherit. TaxDome's accounting report puts peer referral at 58 per cent of how businesses found their current firm and cold outreach at 4 per cent. That last number is the point: almost nobody in this profession is approaching anyone directly.
When you cannot hire a qualified senior, generating demand feels irrational. But declining work at random is not selection, it is a fee mix frozen in place. The practices with real pricing power are the ones holding a list of businesses they could onboard next month, because that list is what makes a disengagement letter easy to sign. Without it, the £900 a year client with the shoebox of receipts stays on the portfolio for another five years.
Owner managed businesses do not shop around for an accountant. They get quietly irritated and do nothing until something forces the issue: accounts filed late, a penalty, a funding application that needed management figures nobody had, a finance manager leaving, or a first MTD quarterly update that landed badly. Switching itself is trivial, a professional clearance letter and a fresh 64-8. The firm in front of them in the fortnight after the trigger takes the fees.
Registered audit firms are only one slice of the profession, but it is the slice counted consistently, and it has fallen by a quarter in four years while private equity backed consolidators buy up the mid tier. Fewer firms, each capacity constrained, with the buy side route to growth priced at roughly a year of the fees you are purchasing. Meanwhile MTD for Income Tax has put hundreds of thousands of sole traders and landlords through a forced change in how their records are kept, with the £30,000 threshold following in April 2027. That is an unusually large number of businesses re-examining an arrangement they had not thought about in years. Direct, selective approach to a defined list is cheaper than 1.2 times GRF and you choose the clients.
Sources: FRC, Key Facts and Trends in the Accountancy Profession 2025 (audit firm registrations, 2024 data). GRF multiple ranges as published by UK practice brokers Kingsman Partners and Bains Watts, 2025 and 2026. Advancetrack Accounting Talent Index 2026, reported by Accountancy Today, May 2026. HMRC, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax mandation estimates.
We start inside your fee data, not in a database. Which sectors carry the highest annual fee for the least partner time, which clients you would quietly let go, and what the replacement looks like by turnover band, VAT status, payroll headcount and bookkeeping software. The target list is then built from Companies House: SIC code, incorporation date, filing history, overdue accounts and late filing penalties, and changes of registered office, which for a large share of owner managed companies is the incumbent accountant's own address.
Sending runs on separate domains we buy and authenticate with SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Your firm's own domain, the one carrying engagement letters, payroll reports, portal notifications and filing confirmations, is never used for prospecting. Mailboxes are warmed before any commercial message goes out.
No disparaging the incumbent, which your Code of Ethics rules out and which does not work in any case. No fee comparison, no promised tax outcome, no exaggerated claim. Each message pairs one verifiable fact about the recipient's own filing position with one specific thing your practice does, whether that is R&D claims in a named sector, group reorganisations, or taking a quarterly update cycle off an owner entirely. Every variant is signed off by you before it sends.
Low volumes per mailbox per day. We answer in your name within working hours, screen out the bargain hunters, the software resellers and the outsourcing vendors, and put a meeting in your diary only when the person is an owner, director or finance lead with the authority to appoint. We never quote a fee on your behalf.
You get the segment by segment reply data, the fee bands the respondents sit in, the objections that repeated, and the cost per held meeting. If that does not justify a monthly engagement, you stop there and keep the domains, the list and the approved copy.
Because what the staffing shortage really freezes is your fee mix. If every slot is full, the only way to lift average fee per client is to disengage at the bottom and replace at the top, and almost nobody signs the disengagement letter until the replacement is visible. A controlled pipeline is what makes that letter easy to send. It also buys you selectivity that referrals never allow: it is difficult to tell a good client that their nephew's business is too small for you.
For limited companies and LLPs, yes. The ICO treats them as corporate subscribers, so the PECR rule requiring prior consent for marketing email does not bite, provided the sender is clearly identified and every message carries a working opt-out. Sole traders and ordinary partnerships count as individual subscribers, so we either exclude them or handle them on a different basis. UK GDPR still applies wherever an address names a person, which is why we run a documented legitimate interests assessment and action objections the same day. The record goes to whichever partner holds compliance.
Not when it is set up correctly, and that is the main reason we never send from your practice domain. Prospecting runs on separate authenticated domains, usually a close variant of the firm name. The mail route carrying your January filing confirmations and your monthly payroll reports is untouched by anything we do.
It would if the copy led on fees. Ours does not mention price. When a reply opens with "what do you charge for a set of accounts and a CT600", that is where it stops and it does not reach your diary. The conversations that do reach you tend to start from a trigger: accounts filed late, an owner who has outgrown a one person bookkeeper, a finance manager who has just resigned, or a business whose lender asked for management accounts nobody could produce.
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. Camley is new. What is not new is the engine, which was built and run as the client acquisition channel for the founder's own advisory consultancy, selling a considered, relationship led professional service to owners and directors. That is closer to how practice work is bought than most agency case studies would be. The £300 four week pilot exists precisely so none of this has to be taken on trust.
£300 for the four week pilot, with no management fee on top. After that, £1,500 a month plus £200 for each qualified meeting actually held. Qualified means the attendee is an owner, director or finance lead at a business matching the profile you signed off, inside your region, and they turned up. A no show costs you nothing and we rebook it. We take one accountancy practice per region, so if we are already working with a firm in your city we will say so and decline.
You sell on results, so it would be strange to ask you to buy on promises. The pilot exists so that your maximum exposure is a known number before anything begins.
The $400 covers hard costs only, the domains and mailboxes built in your name that stay with you whatever happens next. The management fee is the part at risk: miss the meeting target we agreed and you do not pay it. A meeting counts only when the other side actually turns up, and no-shows are ours to rebook rather than yours to absorb.
Book twenty minutes. I will bring a sample list of hiring companies in your specialism and the exact messages I would send them. If the research is not better than what you would do yourself, do not hire us.
Book a 20-minute call →Or simply reply to the email that brought you here.
