Prepare - Begin - Become

Is your firm prepared and ready to start offering a more sophisticated and valuable Business Advisory Service to your SME clients?

Work your way through the free prepare phase of the Profitable Conversations program to assess the preparedness of your practice:

I.      Define the scope of Business Advisory Services in the context of your practice and client base. Download the pdf here and work through the different models to gain clarity over what your BAS offering might look like.

II.     Determine your vision for Business Advisory Services and assessing the untapped potential in your client base. Download the pdf here and work through the questions to clarify your BAS growth goals.

III.    Assess the capacity and capability of your firm to start growing your BAS offering. Download the self-assessment tool here

Most providers advocating that accountants grow their BAS offering start with the numbers – this is evidenced by the plethora of financial reporting software packages on the market today.

Is this because clients want/need better financial reporting or is it because this is where the accountant feels most comfortable starting? 

If you want to be a true business adviser and strategic partner to your SME clients, you will need to go beyond the numbers and be able to solve a broader range of problems. It is often the non-financial issues that end up creating the financial problems in a business. And, it may be too late by the time these problems show up in the numbers.

Remember, you are in the relationship business. Therefore, start with the relationship – the conversation – and not the tools. 

This is a different approach requiring a different conversation with different problem-solving capabilities. The ‘Begin’ phase of the process is designed to ensure you are equipped to have these conversations, now.

This phase typically kicks-off with a one-day workshop to get you started – adding more value and generating more fees – immediately. This is then followed up with monthly coaching sessions to refine your approach and introduce new tools and templates, based on your experiences. Added to this are online resources, such as videos and downloadable templates, designed to support your development as a strategic partner.

The program is an experiential learning program, tailored to the particular needs of your practice and your clients.

Explore some of our blogs related to this topic here.

Up until now you, and probably two or three other key people in your business, have been involved in Profitable Conversations that have grown your value to your SME clients and generated (significant?) fee growth from those clients. In short, you will have tested the potential of the SME market for Business Advisory Services.

In the Become phase of the program we take those experiences and use them to rethink how your business might look in the future. What if we applied these learnings across our firm, what could it be? What do you want it to become?

How do you commercialise your learnings to drive the growth of your business and how you market to the broader SME market (beyond existing clients).

We use a Design-led thinking approach to plan your future business.

One of the most important outcomes from the Begin phase of the program is really a ‘by-product’ of the conversations you have had with clients. You will have become more skilled in getting to the real challenges clients face and will have gathered a considerable amount of knowledge on client needs and wants – their pain and gain points.

The Become phase now uses that knowledge to rethink and evolve your business model. To ‘future-proof’ your business.

The ‘final’ evolution of the Profitable Conversations concept is to realise that Profitable Conversations don’t just apply to interactions with clients. They, just as importantly, also apply to internal communications.

Explore some of our blogs related to this topic here.