Value-adding advisors

Over the last month or so I’ve had a taste of what life must like for Anthony Robbins or Edward De Bono (or maybe not!) with a four-city tour of Australia speaking at CPA Australia’s Congress events.

Accompanying me on this journey has been accountant Peter Knight, who is perhaps best known as one of the founding partners at leading SME-focused accounting firm, Hayes Knight. Together, we’ve been talking to entrepreneurs and CPAs as part of a special SME session at the Congress events.

Peter, who is a terrific guy and a wonderful speaker, now runs a boutique accounting firm called Knight Partners, where one of the things he specialises in is assisting other accounting firms to develop their businesses beyond the normal tax and compliance services.

His point is that as Australia moves towards automatic tax returns (in a few years you will be able to claim $1,000 in automatic deductions) many accounting practitioners who rely on doing individual tax returns will find their businesses under severe pressure.

The key for these businesses will be to focus on providing advice that really adds value to a company – advice on topics such as business planning, succession, wealth management issues and most of all, growth.

For some of the accountants, Peter’s argument is a bit hard to take – they aren’t really thinking like that quite yet.

But others, who have those skills and want to focus on providing those services, are still a bit lost. How do they get clients to realise they can provide that advice, and how do they get clients to pay for it?

This was a bit of a surprise to me. Most of the accountants we talk to when we are working on stories are absolute experts in their field, so I would have thought that entrepreneurs would have been grilling their accountants and advisers for growth advice every time they got anywhere near them. But it doesn’t seem to be happening.

There’s fault on both sides here. The accountants are doing a good enough job of selling themselves, and the business owners are not doing a good enough job of extracting as much strategic advice as they can out of their accountants and advisors.

The solution is simple. Organise a lunch with your accountant, and tell them you are not going to mention the word tax once – it’s going to be a discussion about how the strategy behind your business is developing.

Oh, and tell the accountant they can buy lunch and if you can see they have something great to contribute, you’re happy to pay for some further strategy sessions.

I guarantee both parties will come away with something. The business owner will have at least a few ideas for growth, and the accountant will have the promise of some billable hours down the track.