As more accountants and bookkeepers begin to make the move into offering value-added advisory services, there are a number of obstacles that may manifest. Clients may not see how an accountant or bookkeeper could offer business advice to them, or they may be overwhelmed by reams of different service options you offer. So, what do you do? How do you convince clients and prospects to leverage your value-added services and how do you get them to agree to pay you what you deserve to be paid?

On the 31st of March, we hosted a webinar on this exact theme. I was the host and facilitator of the webinar and I really enjoyed getting into the thick of it with great panelists, namely:

In this article, I've compiled some of the top tips I took away from the webinar around establishing relationships with clients, highlighting your value, and charging the right amount for your services. Read on for all the details.

When it comes to running a successful practice in which your clients trust you to provide them with proactive advisory services, it's important to establish a good relationship with your clients. As our co-founder, Vangelis Kyriazis, says:

“At the end of the day, the relationship that you are building with the client is key to a long term relationship. If they love you and trust you, they’ll refer you to their friends and family, and the conversations will be more meaningful. I think the way you start to build a relationship... is critical.”

If you build a strong relationship with your clients and you meet with them frequently to discuss important financial insights into their business, then you will establish a sense of trust and you will show them your value.

However, Andrew Jordon, co-founder of Connect4, stresses that it's important to meet only when necessary: “You don’t want to have a meeting for meeting’s sake.” It’s hurtful to your business to have meetings that really could have been emails; it’s a waste of time.

Instead, Andrew suggests doing what many big software companies do – have a service level agreement with clients in which you talk about the expectations of the service you are going to deliver. Then you will know how often your client would like to meet with you are what they expect to receive from you in each meeting.

Some of the problems you may face while moving into an advisory space could even be self-inflicted, such as assuming you know what your clients want. Making assumptions is a dangerous game.

“We presume our clients have certain needs. That’s typically one of the biggest mistakes we make. And secondly, in making those presumptions, we go straight into our safe place, which is debits and credits, and we get all excited about bank reconciliations and automatic asset registers and stuff like that. And quite frankly, most of our clients are not sitting on the other side of the telephone line waiting for us to call them to tell them beautiful war stories about bank reconciliations..." - Willem Haarhoff, co-founder of DoughGetters Accounting

The thing about assuming you know what your clients need is that this lacks a certain level of empathy which is crucial to making sure that the service you provide answers clients' specific problems.

And no two clients are the same.

It's worthwhile to speak to your clients, ask them about their business, why they do what they do, and what keeps them up at night! If you shift your perspective to focus on the clients first and foremost, then you will get much closer to what they really need than by positioning yourself as the hero who's come to save them.

The thing is, if this were a movie, you would not be its star. Not because you aren't interesting or good at what you do, but because, in the story of the business, the business owner is the star. If this were a movie about King Arthur, your client would be King Arthur and you would be Merlin.

“The fact that the story is not about Merlin does not mean that Merlin isn’t a legend in his own right. In fact, he’s probably even stronger than King Arthur, but the story is about King Arthur, and Merlin comes alongside him, uses all his tools that he’s blessed with to make sure that King Arthur wins the day.” - Willem Haarhoff, co-founder of DoughGetters Accounting

Donald Miller speaks about this in his book on brand marketing, Building a Storybrand. If you consider your client's experience with you as a kind of mythic journey in which you are their guide – the Merlin to their Arthur – then you are in a much better position to appreciate what their goals are. But this requires a measure of humility.

When it comes to showing a client or prospect the kind of services you offer and how these are valuable, it's crucial to speak to them in language that they can understand, rather than the language that feels most comfortable to you. As Willem says:

“It’s so easy for us to just go back to what we are used to or what we are comfortable with, but I really think we need to challenge ourselves to tell the story behind the numbers, not to talk to the numbers."

Especially if your clients are not particularly numerically-minded, it can be useful to speak to them in simple terms, without any accounting jargon. It can also be helpful to share visualizations with them – such as graphs – that may be easier to understand than a profit and loss statement or balance sheet.

"That’s where, Vangelis, you and your team [at Syft] have been pioneering that space of telling the story behind the numbers. It’s really been a joy to use the app." - Willem Haarhoff, co-founder of DoughGetters

It may be easy for you to understand what's happening in the background, in Xero for instance, but when it comes to clients, they don't necessarily want to – or need to – know all the nitty, gritty details. What they really need to know is what it all means and what steps they can take to solve the problems they are facing.

I've written about this before, but it's worth repeating. People don't view time as value when it's not their own time. Time is an intangible resource. It's hard to quantify how much your time is worth, and if you charge by the hour, clients may often say that you're "too expensive" because they can't really gauge what your time is worth.

Ultimately, what clients want from you is a certain outcome, not your time.

Willem gave a good non-accounting example of when people are prepared to pay more for a certain outcome which actually takes less time to be delivered: air travel.

✈️ Say you book a flight from South Africa to the UK. A direct flight is always more expensive than a flight that stops over in Dubai. But why? If it went according to the time the travel took and the fuel used, surely the stopover flight would be more expensive. But you aren't simply paying for the time it takes; you're paying for convenience. The direct flight solves the problem of wasting your time, of the hassle of going to multiple airports, the risk of lost luggage, the annoyance of having to wait for your connecting flight in an unfamiliar place in the middle of the night.

If we are prepared to pay more for less time with flights, this means that what we care about most is the outcome, not the time it takes to get there.

So why not consider the pricing of your services around the outcome you provide – the problem you solve – rather than how long it takes you to get there?

Once you've established a good relationship with your clients and you know what they expect from you, you will want to start setting up meetings. But to make sure that every meeting you have is worth the while, it's important to come prepared. This means:

In the webinar, we polled attendees to see how often they met with clients and the most common answer was quarterly. Quarterly may work for you, but it's possible you may want to meet with your clients more frequently. Again, it depends on the specific client and their needs and expectations.

Results of webinar poll: 50% meet quarterly, 25% monthly, 17% more than once per month, 8% annually.

Having a process established, or a playbook of sorts, can be helpful when it comes to handing meetings over to more junior staff members. Thanks to digitization and the pandemic's push for remote work, online meetings have become run of the mill, which has had a democratizing effect on the meeting process. As Andrew says:

“It doesn’t matter if you’re at Deloitte or PwC, or whether you’re actually a small accounting firm with 20 clients. You can actually make the client experience pretty great. You can even do better than Deloitte if you have a good setup online.”

Moving into the space of advisory and value-added services can be tricky but there's never been a better time to make the leap.

The way things are moving in the world of accounting and business today, it's become increasingly important to take a proactive approach rather than a reactive one. It will take time and hard work to make the move to value-added services and to educate your clients on what these are and why they need them, but why not give it a go?

To paraphrase world-renowned rugby coach, Jake White: Don't worry about the result; worry about the process. Figure out how you are going to get to where you want to be and the rest will fall into place.