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Anyone Can Do Advisory

8th Jul 2016
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There's lots talked about accountants offering advisory services - or the move from compliance to advisory. Magically somehow accountants are imagined to transform from experts in tax and compliance to strategic business gurus. Sometimes it works, many times it doesn't.

Then comes the clients. The very first comment on this article by Practice Excellence judge, Paul Shrimpling, is that 'advisory' will only represent 1% or 2% of fee income and clients just won't pay for it. Well that depends on what 'it' is.

In my experience, there is high value advice that accountants and bookkeepers are perfectly placed to deliver - advice that business owners happily pay for. Which is not to say that there isn't a place for high-end technical advice, strategic planning or forecasting - just that there is extremely valuable work that any accountant or trainee accountant can deliver.

For example, this week there's been a lot of talk about the late payment problem, with recent research showing that over a third of small small businesses suffered from a productivity drop as a knock-on effect of late payment and the ensuing cashflow problems. (There's even been a music video made about it!) In a time of economic uncertainty, a focus on cashflow is never more relevant - and who better to help than accountants? How many clients have thought in depth about their payment terms, making it easy for their customers pay them, automating a chasing process, and so on...

If you can productise and systematise some of this advice, it's then really easy for clients to buy. The value is clear and benefits measurable (improved cashflow), so any fee resistance tends to be lower. What's more, once sytematised, it's easy to empower other people with in your firm to 'do advisory'.

This is just one example. There are many more common sense, easy to deploy, high value advisory opportunities. What else could we do?

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