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Graham Lamont: How to become a business adviser

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30th Aug 2013
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As part of our practice profitability series we turned for advice to Graham Lamont, a champion of business advisory work.

Lamont Pridmore principal Graham Lamont is well known to AccountingWEB members after his firm won the 2012 Practice Excellence Award for medium-size firms.

Before setting up the firm, he worked as a practice development consultant with AVN. After a few years telling other people how to move their firms into more of a business advisory role, he decided to follow his own advice.

“I was going around loading software and showing firms how to use it, but it was apparent they thought creating the product and delivering it is all that needs to be done,” said Lamont.

“But changing a practice is a greater challenge. It’s slower than you think. The difficulty you’ve got is that there’s only a small amount of capacity to change. The big challenge is creating time in a busy accounting practice.”

At Lamont Pridmore, for example, the senior partner only acts for the firm’s top 15 clients. “I don’t have a day job and an office where I’m bogged down with tax returns,” he said.

Instead, he devotes two-to-three days a week developing strategies, working on ideas for new services and devising marketing plans.

But before you get to marketing the services, he explained, you have to put in people and systems to make clients happy first.

“Clients are all mad keen to buy added value services, but it’s people they want to deal with,” he said.

“You can’t send your audit manager out to talk to an entrepreneur. To be blunt, some people haven’t got it. Some practices won’t make it because they haven’t got the personality to deal with it.”

And before taking your first steps into new advisory services, you need to realise that it’s difficult to do everything yourself. “Can you start partnerships with people who can help you to take the next step?” he asked.

Such a partnership proved fruitful for Lamont Pridmore when it moved into wealth management and there are all sorts of opportunities that may arise with surveyors, lawyers and providers of other specialist services.

Researching client needs and benchmarking performance lie at the heart of the Lamont Pridmore added-value strategy. The firm assiduously collects feedback from clients and found a few years ago that they clients wanted more value-added services and lower rates for compliance work, so Lamont Pridmore reduced its compliance fees and concentrated more on new service lines such as an outsourced finance director service, business consultancy and wealth management.

The outsourced FD concept, based on both Sage and Xero online systems, wraps monthly management information and accounts up with performance benchmarks and profit improvement advice.

The firm’s profit improvement programme is designed to increase clients’ profits by up to 50% and is built around monthly meetings to discuss progress and develop action plans.

That model of regular meetings and feedback works not just for clients, but also helps drive the firm’s own advisory innovations.

Lamont said that he will research new ideas for up to two-to-three months, but the most important factor for delivering it is getting an internal project champion to take on the service and see it through to launch and beyond. It takes motivated people to realise such ambitions, but “they are at the heart of it”, he added.

On its website, Lamont Pridmore maintains a reading list to change your life. It contains many of the usual suspects who will be known to accountancy and management theorists - Charles Handy, Peter Drucker, Ron Baker, Tom Peters, Steven Covey and such like, but it also includes ‘SME Consulting’ by 2020 Group’s Ian Fletcher and Gordon Gilchrist.

Graham Lamont and his colleagues have obviously done their homework. And any practitioners looking to branch out into advisory services would be well advised to follow their example.

Replies (3)

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Chris M
By mr. mischief
30th Aug 2013 19:47

well deserved award

As a one-man band a few miles away from Lamonts I am in some ways a competitor.  LP is one of 4 firms in Cumbria I recommend when either:

1.  Someone asks me for my views on larger firms, for example at networking events, or

2.  I am approached for a quote by a prospect believe is not going to benefit from a sole practicioner due to size or complexity.

Reasons why I recommend them are:

1.  Likely to be minimal risk of unwanted HMRC interest.  Good tax advice but not dodgy tax advice.

2.  Likely to be as fast as the client wants at getting the numbers out.

3.  Quality of service.

4.  Comprehensive use of IT.

This is partly based on what their clients say, partly on my direct experience of their handovers - note the only reason I have won clients from them is on price, there is only 1 other firm in Cumbria I can say that about.

Handovers are speedy, contain no errors or "funny" items such as silly input or output %s on VAT returns, never have scribbly handwritten schedules or other issues which just look amateurish but which a number of local practices persist with nonetheless.

 

Thanks (1)
Replying to SpreadsheetUser:
avatar
By Graham Lamont
08th Sep 2013 16:20

Quality Advice

Nice to hear from a fellow Cumbrian firm and thank you for your kind words.It is important to give the right advice to the right client at a price that they can afford and the value given must always exceed the fee charged. Keep up the good work!

Thanks (0)
By jon_griffey
02nd Sep 2013 12:01

Business advisers

 

There is a trend for firms to describe themselves as 'accountants and business advisers'.   We have not gone down this route as I am wary of the possible PI implications - we cannot be all things to all men.  As mere 'accountants' the terms of engagement are fairly narrowly defined but 'business advisers' seems to me too all encompassing.  What happens if a client suffers a loss because some deal went bad, there was some health & safety disaster or breach of the law or whatever?  Will there be a cry of 'we paid you to be our business adviser, why didn't you advise us?'

I remember a few years ago a client shouting at me down the phone - their van had been stopped by the police and they got fined for carrying carpet off cuts without a waste licence. Apparantly as their accountants we should have told them about this.  My reaction was sorry - you just pay me to complete your tax returns - I know nothing about waste regulations and do not claim to.

Thanks (1)