There is a lot of stuff and nonsense talked about advisory.
I’ve been an advisory partner in a top 10 firm and a 100% new business director in a regional practice plus I’ve worked in big corporate world for a large leisure company and been FD of an SME M and E contractor.
I currently run F3C Advantage and we work with accountancy practices that want to get serious about Advisory – by providing them an Advisory delivery platform called CAS – the Complete Advisory Solution.
So, I reckon I’ve got a pretty good fix on what clients want from accountants plus a pretty a good fix on what accountants feel about Advisory and why to date so many dabble rather than get serious.
OK, let’s get into our helicopters and rise up, look at the big picture, make sure we can see the whole forest and not just a few trees.
Now looking down from our helicopter, let’s keep it simple, what is advisory? The best explanation I have found of advisory is helping clients to:
- Move forward
- Protect and improve their personal positions
- Protect and develop their businesses
And when we accountants help clients we are “facilitating INSIGHTS to INSPIRE clients to INNOVATE and make changes”.
It’s all about the clients.
It starts by helping clients clarify what is most important to them. As we know clients are not all the same and they want different things. Never assume clients are clear about what is important to them.
When we help clients clarify what’s important to them this enables us to fully understand their personal and business goals and aspirations. Not only is this essential to ensure we are providing best advice but it’s one of the three things that all client surveys over the last 30 years or more have identified that clients want from their accountants
- To show they care and are in it for the long haul
- To bring new ideas
- To understand me and my business
The Success Gap Model is an excellent way of illustrating what is important to a client or prospect. Some measures of success will be financial – the pound note – others will be non-financial – the smiley face. Do you know all the pound notes and smiley faces for all your best clients?
How can we help clients achieve their pound notes and smiley faces?
Every time you look a client square between the eyes think – what’s the plan, their plan? Have they got a clear plan? Does it go beyond just numbers?
Being the person who has helped the client put their plans together is a powerful position to be. Being in the room when the decisions are being made establishes you as their MOST trusted adviser. You want to be more than just someone who helps them with implementation or solves ad hoc problems.
An annual planning event with your best clients is a great place to be and is core to Advisory.
In today’s fast-moving world not everyone wants to take a day out, so be flexible, break it down into bite size chunks. Two hour sessions are probably optimal going up to maybe half a day. The client experience is everything – when they leave you they should be thinking, “that was great and I want more”, not “that was great but I’m exhausted”! Regular client Advisory meetings with the reference point being the client plan that you helped them put together is also core to Advisory – and will result in new recurring income streams plus project spin off work.
So how do we get serious about Advisory?
Well I was the 100% new business director in a regional practice that tripled in size in two years and I have seen other firms achieve great results. How? The answer is – organise and structure advisory just as you have probably already organised and structured everything else in your business – with systems and process.
We know that good process provides
- Leverage and scale
- Consistency and quality control
- Accelerated learning and development
Most firms whether they are large or small have written or unwritten processes for how they deal with accounts and audit work or tax work. Let’s call them standard operating processes or SOP’s. Few have SOP’s for Advisory work. The successful firms have SOP’s for Advisory.
Accepting that most firms seek to be better at the WIN
W – Winning new clients
I – Increasing client spend
N – Nurturing client relationships for retention
Then successful firms develop standard operating processes
W – SOP to differentiate to attract new clients
I – SOP to broaden the services the clients buy
N – SOP to protect and develop client relationships
If you want to get serious then systems and processes are essential as is the development of SOP’s. You could create your own process in your head or you could look to bring in a proven process from outside – make sure it is client centric and can be deployed in a way that fits you and firm’s priorities.
So how does this work in practice?
I was talking with a small firm before Christmas with two partners. Partner number one has started as the champion but the plan is to involve a new director who joins them after Easter thus creating a pod – the champion model becomes a pod model. The long-term plan is build the advisory revenues and integrate advisory across the whole firm but in the short term it is champion to pod.
The firm in question reckon the have 200 or so business clients and they have segmented and targeted the top 20%. Post year end or pre year end meetings are being held with each of these clients over the next 12 months using one of the CAS tools specifically designed for such meetings. The plan is to migrate a proportion of these clients from being primarily compliance to being compliance advisory. Forty client meetings piggy backing off existing meetings over 12 months they believe is very manageable.
Supplementing this will be a process for handling prospect meetings. The plan is to attract compliance advisory clients and advisory only clients. And then migrate some of the advisory only clients to become compliance advisory clients.
Draw yourself three columns. Left hand column is your C clients. The middle column is your CA clients and the righthand column your A clients.
This firm is serious, it is organised, it’s deploying process in a way that suits them and they are making their life easier by using a delivery platform.
John will be speaking at Accountex on 2 May in the Business and Finance theatre at 11am.
