Before You Think About Advisory Services… Do this first.

Summary

• To Start Advisory Services, You Need More Leverage 
• Rethink Your Calendar
• Map Out Your Client Journey
• Build a Not-To-Do List

Resources

• How to Use “Leveraged Accounting Advisory” to Build a 4-Day Work Week 
• Wrangle Your Thoughts: 12 Effective Time Management Strategies for Accounting Firm Owners 
• Double Your Accounting Firm 

To Start Advisory Services, You Need More Leverage

Today, the founder and CEO of Jetpack Workflow, David Cristello is back with another solo cast to cover a consistently hot topic in the accounting industry, advisory. 

It seems like everyone wants to begin with advisory services but aren’t sure what exactly it entails. Essentially, it’s being future-facing and proactive with your clients. You can help them:

• Identify new opportunities
• Meet new potential partners
• Solidify the rest of their back office
• Add more value to their services

These are all things that help position you to build a stronger relationship with your clients and a more profitable firm. 

Since the pandemic, it’s been tough for firm owners to find the space to lean into advisory. But ultimately, it comes down to one thing, leverage. 

How do you regain leverage over your time and mental capacity to think about what you need to do to elevate your client relationships and be a leader for your firm?

Most people jump to leveraging their time by hiring, but this is not ideal. In 2022, this model isn’t working, we are seeing a lot of turnover and overhead. The size of your team has become a vanity metric, but it’s important to stop solving problems by hiring. It might be the right move in some cases, but it can become a bad habit in the long run. 

Instead, take a step back. While everything else is changing, you need to determine what isn’t changing. Your clients need services and you need more time to design these services, that’s where leverage comes from. 

Here are a few ways you can get more leverage for your firm:

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Rethink Your Calendar

First things first, your calendar. To see your priorities, look at your calendar to see how you are booking things and look at how easy it is for people to take your attention away from yourself. 

If you have indefinite openings on your calendar for clients and team members to book your time to the point where you don’t have time to think strategically about your business, you need to reassess. 

Try time-blocking your calendar to build in the focus and strategic thinking time you need to grow your firm and dial in to how you plan to incorporate advisory services. 

Map Out Your Client Journey

Take time to think about what the client’s journey is, from prospect all the way to fulfillment. 

Make sure you understand the key stages and where the bottlenecks are. What is sucking up the most time? Can you find a better tool to speed up this process? Most likely, the answer is yes. 

When you map out the journey, you can nail down where you need to improve your processes, whether that be through hiring or implementing a tool like Jetpack Workflow. 

Build a Not-To-Do List

Put a “not-to-do list” together to give yourself more space to think about leveraging your firm. 

If you’re going through a thought process of “I need a new coach, I need more training, I need to write a book, attending just one more networking event will help” take 30 days to think and access the state of the firm, and business. This will give you time back into your day, week, and month. 

Advisory relationships are very important. Firms that can figure out how to provide these services well are going to win in today’s economy. 

However, too often firms don’t take the time to properly leverage before getting started. Take a step back and determine what you can declutter, get rid of, and say no to today to help you in the long run. 

If you are on this journey and determine workflow is a key challenge, check out our free resource called “The Buyers Guide to Workflow Software for Accountants”. It covers and compares the top 11 tools in the marketplace. 

And if you enjoyed this solo cast be sure to share it with someone else who might need to hear it too!