How do you actually deliver advisory services? Here are some ideas to get you started.
- Be clear how advisory fits into your overall strategy. Don’t just do it because somebody has told you to but understand what sort of advice you are willing, and able, to deliver. Areas you might want to help your clients with are: pricing, systems, marketing, cost control, tax, credit control, cashflow, funding, preparing their business for sale, or just helping them to get a better work-life balance.
- Decide how you want to provide advice and at what price. Do you want individual consultations or more generic business advice to a group of clients and prospects in the form of a webinar, masterclass or bootcamp?
- Decide who will deliver the services. You may not be the best person to offer business advice. You may prefer to partner with a business coach or other expert on some, or all, of the areas.
- Have a clear marketing strategy. Just as for compliance services, you need to be clear on who you want to sell to and what their buying journey looks like.
- Look at the resources available to you. Clarity HQ helps to automate some of your advice, The Gap have resources that you can buy in, or you can build up your own assets in the form of helpsheets, calculators, templates, and videos.
- Consider whether there is software that can help you to spot opportunities to help your clients. Apps such as Senta, Satago, Capitalise and others all have accountant or portfolio views of useful KPIs.
- Decide on your pricing structure. It is easier to demonstrate value with advisory services that change the numbers so you can consider value pricing, fixed pricing or, in some circumstances, hourly pricing for consultancy. Or you might prefer a regular retainer if you have a clearly defined, monthly service.
- Your existing team may not be ready to offer advisory services. Consider whether you need to recruit a new member for your team or to train an existing person.
- Be clear who are your main competitors. It’s not just other advisers as clients may try to manage by reading books and/or doing it themselves.
- Be your first client. Make sure that you implement all the right advice in your own business first. Test things out to see how they work in practice and to act as a role model and case study to show prospects how you can help them to run a more profitable business.
Remember that business advice is about changing the numbers; not just measuring them.
How to do advisory
Follow this compelling series of three consecutive webinars to understand from concept to implantation how to make advisory services a reality in your practice.
