Does Advisory Entirely depend upon you?
Are You the Bottleneck in Your Advisory Practice?
You want to grow advisory.
You know your clients need more than compliance.
But there’s a problem that catches out a lot of accounting and bookkeeping practice owners:
All the advisory still depends on you.
You’re the person having the conversations, spotting the opportunities, asking the questions and helping clients make decisions. And as more clients want that support, your workload grows with it.
Instead of advisory creating a more valuable, scalable practice, you’ve simply created another job for yourself.
In this episode of Advisory Conversations, Tim Seymour and Deb Halliday talk about the advisory bottleneck — why it happens, how they’ve experienced it in their own practices, and why the answer isn’t simply for the owner to work harder.
It’s about building an advisory team.
A team where advisory capability doesn’t sit with one person. Where technicians can develop into advisors, conversations can be shared, and different members of the team can contribute their skills, experience and perspective to create better outcomes for clients.
Tim and Deb also explore what needs to change when you move from an owner-led advisory model to a team-delivered one — from developing people and building confidence to creating a shared approach to the way advisory is delivered.
Because there’s one very simple question every practice owner should be able to answer:
What happens to your advisory service when you’re not there?
If the answer is “it stops”, you haven’t built a scalable advisory service yet.
You’ve built an advisory bottleneck.
In this episode:
- Why practice owners so easily become the advisory bottleneck
- Why adding advisory to an already full workload isn’t sustainable
- The difference between owner-led and team-delivered advisory
- How developing your team creates capacity for growth
- Why advisory doesn’t need to be delivered by one “expert”
- The importance of communication and collaboration across the team
- Tim and Deb’s own experiences of moving beyond owner dependency
- The question every practice owner should ask about what happens when they’re absent
Advisory shouldn’t depend on one person.
Build the capability across the team, and you can create something far more valuable — for your clients, your people and your practice.
Find out more
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Transcript
Welcome to Advisory Conversations with Tim Seymour and Deb Halliday.
Speaker A:This podcast is for accounting professionals and financial coaches who are ready to step beyond compliance and into advisory.
Speaker A:Because real advisory isn't about doing more yourself, it's about building something that works without you being the bottleneck.
Speaker A:Hello and welcome again to our podcast, Advisory Conversations.
Speaker A:And joined with me again, of course, is Deb.
Speaker A:Deb, how are you today?
Speaker B:I'm really well, Tim, thanks.
Speaker B:How are you?
Speaker A:Oh, I'm pretty good.
Speaker A:I'm pretty good.
Speaker A:I always am when we're going to chat about one of our favorite topics.
Speaker A:So we're going to talk about recognizing the advisory bottleneck today because this is a common, a common problem that accounting and bookkeeping practice owners suffer from, but they don't always recognise that it's an issue.
Speaker A:So we're going to talk about how advisory often begins and that it's the owner that tends to take on the advisory work.
Speaker A:Isn't it, Deb?
Speaker A:Initially, yeah.
Speaker B:My experience, we take on team member to help with the technical aspects and that frees us up.
Speaker B:So we end up with a team of technicians, freezes up, and then we realize that actually with our free time we could be doing advisory.
Speaker B:So we start offering advisory services and then at some point you realize you don't want to take on anymore because it is going to all land in your lap and there's a lot more work than you actually realize in the first place because it takes up a lot of head space and you're not only running your own business, but you end up in your own head running somebody else's as well and thinking of somebody else's business a lot.
Speaker B:So, yeah, there's mental capacity as well as time capacity, isn't there?
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:I can remember back when I had my accounting practice and I found a way to deliver advisory and I found it really exciting and I really enjoyed having those conversations.
Speaker A:But it was, it became quite apparent quite quickly that I could only serve so many people and also look after the compliance side of the business.
Speaker A:And so that was, that was the moment where luckily for me, I know we've talked about this on numerous occasions, but luckily for me, someone came in and offered to buy, buy the practice and I sold the compliance off and kept the advisory.
Speaker A:But not everybody is lucky enough to have that as an option.
Speaker A:It just happened for me and I took the opportunity because I saw that as a great opportunity to move forward for me.
Speaker A:But what I, what I saw when we were running the previous membership and I was working with accounting and bookkeeping practice owners, and they would.
Speaker A:They would start to deliver advisory.
Speaker A:So I would guide them and help them learn how to deliver advisory.
Speaker A:They would go to their clients.
Speaker A:They would say, we can help you with this.
Speaker A:They would start to engage with the clients and have an advisory offer to provide.
Speaker A:But they generally get to about five or six clients that they would deliver advisory to on, let's say, a monthly basis.
Speaker A:And things would slow up.
Speaker A:Things would start to become a bit stagnant.
Speaker A:Now, the work with those clients would be good.
Speaker A:The members would say how much they enjoyed doing the work, but something was holding them back from moving forward.
Speaker A:And I feel that that was because everything revolved around them.
Speaker A:And that's not a criticism of them, by the way, because at that point, I probably hadn't identified the problem in the way that you and me did together when we kind of left the membership and then we talked more about what you did with your team because you created the advisory team.
Speaker A:So you were kind of one of the originals to.
Speaker A:To have done this, Deb, and leading the way for all of us with that.
Speaker A:With that way of thinking.
Speaker A:But it's interesting because I think we've all been there where the energy is high, and this is really great.
Speaker A:I'm doing something really meaningful, but we still got responsibility of everything else running the accounting practice going on in the background.
Speaker A:And it's hard to be.
Speaker A:Not sucked back into that.
Speaker A:Do you say that's a fair appraisal of what happens in general?
Speaker B:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker B:I mean, I know, as you say, I know firsthand because that.
Speaker B:That happened to me.
Speaker B:And I remember I'd swapped book.
Speaker B:The realization that I'd swapped bookkeeping, and I had a team that were doing the bookkeeping, but I'd swapped it for meetings with the clients to uncover their goals, their aspirations, their.
Speaker B:Their hidden obstacles, and talk more about their accounts, which was Advisory was the advisory service.
Speaker B:But I realized quite quickly that I had time for the meetings.
Speaker B:What I didn't have time for was the preparation in between each meeting to enable the client to move forward.
Speaker B:I also realized it wasn't really what I needed to be doing.
Speaker B:I needed to be running my business, growing my business.
Speaker B:So, yeah, so I reached out to a colleague that was a business financial coach and asked if she had capacity.
Speaker B:She did.
Speaker B:And we transferred my clients that I was.
Speaker B:I was working with over to her.
Speaker B:That freed me up, but I realized that she would be at capacity as well.
Speaker B:So that's when I started teaching the other team members the bookkeepers and accountants, entry level strategies for advisory so that they could start having conversations and start taking the meetings.
Speaker B:Not only that, start doing the preparation and the work in between each meeting, which, yeah, I mean there's, there's quite a lot to it.
Speaker B:It's a full time job if you're going to have more than a handful of clients.
Speaker B:So, yeah, might just be 10 hours worth of delivery, but it's the preparation in between and the headspace in between that takes up your time as well.
Speaker B:You're firefighting, you're running a business, trying to onboard clients, trying to make sure that everybody's happy, meeting deadlines.
Speaker B:So yeah, we just saw it throughout other practice owners, they were hitting the same.
Speaker A:It's interesting, Deb, because you said that you got one of your team to take over some of the advisory calls, but you recognized very quickly that they would be at capacity.
Speaker A:And it's a really important point because it's very easy to listen to what we're talking about.
Speaker A:And maybe a lot of people have probably recognized this in their own firms.
Speaker A:Maybe they've recognized that they are a bottleneck, that everything revolves around them.
Speaker A:So they bring someone in to be a leader of the team.
Speaker A:But actually what happens is they transfer the bottleneck to the leader of the team and the leader, the team leader then becomes the bottleneck.
Speaker A:And so you have to be really careful that you manage these transitions in the right way and that the team as a whole are empowered so that they can actually deliver advisory when required, but also have input to what, to the client's outcomes, in effect.
Speaker A:Because everybody within the team will have a different perspective and a different angle of how to approach what they're seeing in the numbers, what they've picked up from the conversations that have been had.
Speaker A:So it's kind of important to keep everybody in the team in the loop, isn't it?
Speaker A:So they're aware what's going on so that anyone can answer a question when it comes up.
Speaker A:But also if someone's not around, if the leader's not around, if the owner's not around, someone from the team can step in and deliver the advisory strategy session, whatever we want to call it, at the end of the day with the client.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:So we used to have team meetings on a Monday afternoon and we would discuss a handful of clients each week that we were going to be serving in that, in that week for their advisory meetings.
Speaker B:We would kind of have different team members delivering different levels of advisory.
Speaker B:So the entry level stuff, which was the cash management strategy or the debt management strategy, which was we used to snowball debt.
Speaker B:They could be, we had a couple of team members that would, that were trained on those.
Speaker B:So if that was something that was going to come up during that week, we would assign the team member to have that meeting.
Speaker B:And the higher level stuff was done by the financial coach that I mentioned, but it meant that we could serve a lot more people at ground level cash management and debt snowball.
Speaker B:And then the higher level stuff could be done by the coach.
Speaker B:But we all had meetings together and we all discussed what was going on with the client.
Speaker B:So it meant that the more junior members or the more recent members to the team could learn from the longer standing team members and from the business financial coach and gain confidence as well because they could hear the past history and how the client likes to be talk to or things that are going on in their life.
Speaker B:And it would, it would take the uncertainty of going into a meeting for the first time away because other people had dealt with that client and could kind of do like a little bit of an introduction for the team members so that they go in a bit warmer than not having dealt with them before.
Speaker B:So yeah, it worked really, really well.
Speaker B:And if I was to have another accountancy practice, which I never intend on doing, but, but if I was to, I would do it the same way because it works so well.
Speaker B:So that's why we know it will work for others.
Speaker A:Yeah, if, if, like me, I think you retired your, your membership, didn't you, when you, when you sold your business like I did when I sold mine.
Speaker A:Then there's.
Speaker A:Yeah, I don't really want to go back to that either.
Speaker A:But it, it, it's an interesting concept though, isn't it?
Speaker A:Because we probably would both do things slightly differently.
Speaker A:Again, because there's changes since you've sold yours.
Speaker A:There's massive changes since I sold mine.
Speaker A:It's been a few years now.
Speaker A:It's interesting when we talk about the concept of an advisory team because when we think of a team in respect of accounting and bookkeeping practices, we think of a senior accountant, a junior accountant, some book, you know, maybe a bookkeeper or two.
Speaker A:Maybe we have an admin person that takes care of perhaps other stuff, the AML stuff, you know, all that, all those these kind of roles that are important to accounting practices and necessary and required.
Speaker A:But when we talk about an advisory team, it's a different set of skills, there's a different way of talking to clients and some of the people that like doing, having their head in the numbers aren't necessarily confident talking to clients, but they could be.
Speaker A:It is possible for anybody to learn how to hold conversations with clients.
Speaker A:It's just more of a confidence issue.
Speaker A:But I would say that there's going to be lots of practice owners out there that probably feel like they're always being pulled back in by the team because they're being asked questions all the time.
Speaker A:Can I just ask you this?
Speaker A:Can I just ask you that?
Speaker A:What would you do?
Speaker A:How do I solve this problem?
Speaker A:Can you look at this for me?
Speaker A:And the more team members you've got, the harder it is to not get dragged back in.
Speaker A:It might be that that's transferred down to perhaps a team leader, but even so, somebody's getting dragged into these conversations all the time.
Speaker A:So when we build an advisory team, it's more about not having people that just do things and complete technical tasks.
Speaker A:It's more about having people that feel safe to have an input, feel safe to speak up and offer up their opinion and their thoughts on what they're seeing.
Speaker A:And it's difficult for practice owners to be able to create that environment, isn't it?
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, the way that I overcame it, I recorded my own meetings and then gave the recording to the newer team member so they could see how the meeting was format, the flow of the conversation.
Speaker B:And it was more my trust and my confidence in them that they fed from.
Speaker B:You know, they kind of like, well, if Deb trusts me and thinks I can do it, then I can do it and here's how she does it.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:And they were allowed to make mistakes.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:You know, they were allowed to not have all the answers and as long as the client was told, I'm not sure, I'll get back to you on that.
Speaker B:And it was followed through and they got back to with the answer the same day, then that was absolutely fine.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So it, and you just, you just watch their confidence grow.
Speaker B:The more they did it, you know, the more confident they became.
Speaker B:And as I say, you start them off with a very basic entry level strategy that they can work with with the client.
Speaker B:And it's, they start to build up the rapport.
Speaker B:They start to get used to the type of conversation and the kind of questions that are going to come up as we all learn.
Speaker B:But it's just given them that space to learn and the confidence to, to do it and the training to be able to do that.
Speaker B:You know, checking to see what skills gaps they might have and then making sure that they're filled, that they're not just chucked in the deep end that you've assessed.
Speaker B:Do they have the right presentation skills?
Speaker B:Can they hold a conversation for long enough?
Speaker B:Can they lead a conversation?
Speaker B:And it's all these kind of skills that you can assess with them when you're talking to them.
Speaker B:If you get them to actually present in a team meeting and present their own findings in a team meeting, you can see their presentation skills.
Speaker B:So you can see what.
Speaker B:What's lacking.
Speaker B:And that also gives them confidence.
Speaker B:So, yeah, there's ways, I mean, there's certain, there's certainly ways to make your team capable of stepping up to the table and offering advisory.
Speaker B:Some take longer than others, but they're all capable.
Speaker A:Yeah, I a firm believer in.
Speaker A:I'm not a believer in people having meetings for the sake of meetings, by the way, but I'm a firm believer in the team having meetings.
Speaker A:And I agree with what you just said there.
Speaker A:You could take it in turns and rotate who leads that conversation each time, because that will help build their confidence.
Speaker A:I think that's a really good point to make.
Speaker A:But I also think that if they have these regular meetings and they discuss some of the clients that they're serving, there's a great opportunity to act as a team to support those clients for whoever from the team is going forward to have the next conversation with them.
Speaker A:It might be that it's mainly the same person that has those conversations, but it might also be that it's dependent on the strategy that that client is looking to overcome or to have.
Speaker A:Have support with.
Speaker A:So, you know, if you have a pool of strategies and you are able to pick out certain strategies, you could have certain team members that deal with certain strategies.
Speaker A:You wouldn't necessarily, again, you need to be careful.
Speaker A:You're not creating another bottleneck even further down the line.
Speaker A:So you would probably want, depending on how many people you've got, you want more than one person being able to deliver different strategies.
Speaker A:But would you say you'd have a system in place so that they would have opportunity to be able to look into the strategy that they were then going to go and support the client with?
Speaker B:Yeah, so we would have the templates, the spreadsheets that we would use, there'd be recordings of meetings, there'd be a process and a structure that you would take the client through.
Speaker B:Maybe the template of an agenda that you're going to talk about.
Speaker B:In a particular strategy meeting, you mentioned that you should have more than one.
Speaker B:So the way we did it, we had a whole catalog of strategies and they would start learning the entry level ones and when they got proficient with that, they would actually move through.
Speaker B:So all of our team would end up with all of the strategies.
Speaker B:We actually had a coaching program, we called it.
Speaker B:I wrote the book how to Build a Financially Healthy Business.
Speaker B:And, and that is full of the strategies that we actually took our clients through.
Speaker B:And each client, each team member would learn those strategies.
Speaker B:And yeah, it was all put on a learning platform.
Speaker B:So it was easy, accessible.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker A:And Deb, you know, the other aspect of that is there's a way of learning strategies, isn't there, where you learn the theory, you go out, have the conversation and you kind of report back to your team, don't you?
Speaker A:So there's a way of learning these strategies which we actually share within our advisory teams program.
Speaker A:So we won't talk about that too much right now, but it's just a little hint there for people listening.
Speaker A:There are ways of delivering these strategies that we make as simple as possible.
Speaker A:Break it right down.
Speaker A:So it's easy for any team member to learn these.
Speaker A:And when you have strategies, you've got a pool of options to better go and help a client with.
Speaker A:I talked about meetings with the team.
Speaker A:You've just talked about that.
Speaker A:When I was in the previous membership, I was responsible for accounting of butchering and practice owners, building an advisory offer and creating an advisory to their clients and listening to the outcomes that their clients were achieving.
Speaker A:And it was very fulfilling in that way, the ripple effect of how that went down the line.
Speaker A:But I quickly recognized that I was the only person guiding, mentoring and looking after the members who were the practice owners within the membership.
Speaker A:And it dawned on me quite quickly that I was becoming a bottleneck myself.
Speaker A:So I created a team of guides, as we called ourselves.
Speaker A:And so initially I had one with us, one with me straight away, who kind of shadowed me and then kind of joined me on calls, joined me on one to one calls, joined me on the weekly sessions, and then we brought someone else in as well.
Speaker A:So we ended up with a, with a small team.
Speaker A:But even so, the three of us, all of us could offer what we needed to offer to anyone at any particular time.
Speaker A:And so that meant that when we had the weekly sessions in the group environments, I didn't necessarily have to be on all those calls, but we would always have a team meeting beforehand so that everything was understood and we knew, all knew what we were going to talk about, who was talking about, what, what strategies we were going to bring to the table to help the members move forward with their businesses and how they delivered advisory to their clients.
Speaker A:So it's an important point to mention because it's something that we have lived and breathed ourselves in different ways.
Speaker A:You live.
Speaker A:I didn't necessarily live this in my accounting practice.
Speaker A:I only had a, you know, I had an accountant and a bookkeeper at different times.
Speaker A:So I had someone looking out to the client side and I was able to take advisory to a point, but I didn't really have a team.
Speaker A:But when I took the membership on, I built a team very quickly because I could see the issue was coming, that my time was just being completely, you know, sucked away from me.
Speaker A:And I.
Speaker A:And I had to find a way to be fresh and be energetic on the course that I did attend.
Speaker A:And I chose to attend lots, of course, because I enjoyed doing it.
Speaker A:You yourself recognized it in your bookkeeping practice, and you built your bookkeeping practice when you regenerated it, you built it deliberately around having a team to deliver all these things for you so that you could do the other stuff, the marketing, the, you know, bringing in new clients and all the stuff that we need to do as business owners.
Speaker A:And I just think it's important to highlight that because there's a question that we could answer when we ran our businesses in the last few years if you weren't around for a month.
Speaker A:So I'm asking this to any accounting and bookkeeping practice owners listening right now.
Speaker A:If for one reason or another, you could not be involved in your business for a month or maybe even six to eight weeks, what would happen?
Speaker A:What would stop?
Speaker A:Where would.
Speaker A:Where would things come to a standstill?
Speaker A:Now, if you've got a team, I would suggest the compliance side would probably be looked after, but the advisory, what would happen to your clients that are looking to you for the strategic advice that you can offer them?
Speaker A:So that's a question to leave you with at the end of this episode, I would say.
Speaker A:But it's one that I think is well worth thinking about and well worth having a thought.
Speaker A:And if you recognize to yourself that, yeah, I can see there's a problem here, that problem is only going to get bigger.
Speaker A:You know, if you take on more clients, that problem is just going to explode and you're going to.
Speaker A:Your time is going to be compressed, you're going to be at capacity.
Speaker A:You're not going to be there for, outside of work, with your family, with your hobbies.
Speaker A:Whatever it is that you do outside of work is going to suffer.
Speaker A:So I would urge you to have A think about that, think about how you can create and build an advisory team.
Speaker A:And of course, if you need help with that, we're the only people that can help you.
Speaker A:So if you go to our website, apxtraining.co.uk you'll be able to find out more about us and you could click onto the mentorship page and you can find out more about our programs.
Speaker A:At the end of September, we are launching our live cohorts where we'll be delivering weekly live workshops to all of our mentees, as we call them, in our mentorship.
Speaker A:So we would welcome you to come and join us and be part of that.
Speaker A:We've already got some people in there going through the elearning platforms and the training portals that we've developed and the feedback's been fantastic so far.
Speaker A:So we're looking forward to then taking that to the next level with the live workshops and, you know, really bringing in some accountability and welcoming people in to our community APX training.
Speaker A:So I'm going to share the website one more time.
Speaker A:That's apxtraining.co.uk.
Speaker A:Deb, have I missed anything out?
Speaker A:Is there anything I need to add into this?
Speaker B:I suppose if you want to come and chat to us beforehand, you can come to Cross Us and Coffee, which is our coffee morning on a Tuesday at 9am you can go to our Facebook group and get access and come and ask us as many questions as you like.
Speaker A:I couldn't sell it better myself.
Speaker A:And the Facebook group is called Advisory teams.
Speaker A:So just hop on to Facebook, type in advisory teams.
Speaker A:You'll see us smiling faces.
Speaker A:You can just request to join, we'll let you in and yeah, come along.
Speaker A:You'll get access to our crosswords and coffee sessions, as Deb says, which we hold Every Tuesday at 9 o'.
Speaker A:Clock.
Speaker A:We have great fun on those sessions, living and breathing.
Speaker A:What we've talked about earlier about creating a safe environment for your team, where we like to think crosses a coffee is a safe environment for our community, our friends to come along and ask questions and speak and never be judged.
Speaker A:And we've all been in the beginning of our journey, we've all been in the middle of our journey.
Speaker A:We're still on a journey and no questions are silly.
Speaker A:So feel free to come along to those.
Speaker A:It's a great, great opportunity to get to know us and have a chat.
Speaker A:But for now, thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker A:Thanks, Deb, for sharing all of your wisdom and experience from running your business as well and all your knowledge it's really appreciated.
Speaker A:And yeah, we'll see you on our next episode.
Speaker B:See you then.
Speaker A:Thanks for listening to advisory conversations with Tim Seymour and Deb Halliday.
Speaker A:If you found this useful, make sure you're subscribed.
Speaker A:Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.
Speaker A:We'll see you next time.
