It aint rocket science.
If you are finding it difficult to scale advisory in your practice then start with the following.
First of all you are not going to succeed by making advisory niche and separate – scale ACROSS your whole practice so that it is something everyone sees, experiences and understands.
Most everyone pretty much knows what is involved with how you prepare a set of accounts or complete a tax return, it should be the same with Advisory – this is what do we do, why do we do it and how do we do it.
Let’s take onboarding new clients as an example.
What do you do with new clients on day one that not only makes sure you “Know Your Client” but you also show the client you fully understand them and their goals and priorities – so that you are helping them from day one and providing the services they need to “do better” and be more successful?
Within CAS Complete Advisory Solution we recommend providing new clients with a free one hour clients induction process called the Business Onboarder – this is an example of a Standard Operating Process or SOP; this is how we do business, this is what we do with new clients – and everyone knows this is what the practice does. There is another Onboarder for tax clients that looks at the clients personal affairs.
You can also use the same process to transform existing client relationships from primarily compliance led to primarily advisory led. Some practices badge this a client care – but don’t forget the purpose is to help the client “do better” and by doing so generate more fees for you. As one sole practitioner puts it “more for the client and more for us – win/win”.
For existing clients this can be positioned as follows; we have this great new onboarding process for new clients to make sure we fully understand then and are helping them as best we can – and then we though why on earth are we not doing this with our best existing clients which is why I’m calling you.
What client would say no to a free one hour review of their affairs when you have told them that you are asking them as one of your best clients?
A word of warning! Segment your client base and start with a rolling programme of maybe 10% of your clients – it’s a nice problem to have but you will generate lots of work and you want to be able to control this.
In Part Two we will look at scaling your prospecting using Advisory led approaches to win more and better quality new clients
