Business Fortune Telling
Do your clients expect you to be a Fortune Teller?
How often do you sit with a client going through accounts, tax returns, Companies House filings and financial planning meetings to be confronted with all the other things they are worried about? Like:
How can I sell more?
How can I find more customers?
Why are my customers leaving?
What systems should I buy?
What can I do about my cashflow?
Why aren’t my people pulling their weight?
What does it take to make a profit from this business?
What do you think my business is worth?
And so on...
You see, as an accountant you’re also meant to be a fortune teller.
“After all. You see lots of businesses; you must see what others are doing!” they say.
Tough isn’t it?
Try to help, and you are bogged down for an unbillable hour or more. And worse, if you make some suggestions, you’re taking responsibility for the outcomes (or lack of). You obviously want to help because if you don’t s/he might look elsewhere.
So, what to do?
Well there’s lots of software about for accountants that claims to provide you with readymade solutions. So, you invest in a couple only to find that really, they don’t. They produce lots of pretty graphs and give pointers to ‘things to consider’ and fact sheets, after which, you still have a client saying
“sure, but what exactly shall I do?”
So, in desperation you recommend a consultant and risk exposing your client to big bills and an unfavourable result for which he will blame you.
Or play it safe and say, “sorry I’m not qualified to help”, and risk a loss of confidence in you.
What price crystal balls!
So, you investigate what it is that business consultants actually do
…to see if you can learn, and you discover that (if they are competent) they:
Interview the client to get his/her assessment of the problem
Check it out through team, supplier, customer interviews
Research what’s actually happening, day to day internally and externally to find out:
What is being done to find new customers?
What is the product and service quality like?
How does that compare with competitors?
What systems/technology are they using to work efficiently (or not)?
How are staff and contractors recruited, managed, trained to work productively (or not)?
How are finances managed to create a good enough gap between income and costs? (or not)
Does the value of the business reflect the effort being put in?
What is the owner’s exit plan?
What is the business vision & mission?
Are there visible strategies to achieve these?
Do they make sense?
Carry out a SWOT session with the team
Write a blunt situation report setting out all the issues / risks / opportunities that are affecting the business’s performance and present it.
Get fired for upsetting the boss with the truth or get appointed to create a plan that will lead the business to the Promised Land.
Compile a plan setting out:
Vision
Mission
Objectives for:
Marketing
Operations
Systems / Technology
People
Finance
Exit
Define the strategies that will achieve the Objectives
Define the detailed Action steps that will achieve the Strategies
Put names of those responsible against each, with dates
Get told “thanks, we’ll take it forward ourselves now”, and accept that it won’t happen (much), or get appointed to implement it.
Spend several months trying to implement your plan with people who have no time or no skills to do what is needed.
Introduce training to upskill the implementers.
Get fired after a few months because the boss is scared of your changes and costs and resistant backchat from the team. It’s presented as “something has come up, we need to put your project on the back burner. We’ll get back to you when we have more brain space”
Never hear from them again.
Or, find that you have the 1 in 100 client who does it all, it works, the business makes it to the Promised Land, and takes you on as a well-paid non-executive director.
And that is the reality of business consultancy.
So, is that the life for you? It’s awfully different from accountancy!
But should it be? Can one successfully combine the two?
Back to crystal gazing, just bear in mind that accountants are cast in the mould of historians whilst consultants are viewed as the fortune tellers.
But what if you could make your client’s history by riding into the future together?
It seems to me that a smart accountant does just that, by bonding with his / her client to share their personal ambitions, understand the business, recognise the issues facing both and contributing to strategy as it’s being formed.
And it does happen, I’ve met them, in fewer than 5% of all accountants.
How do they do it? Not through rocket science, but with common sense.
It starts with finding out all about the owner. Share personality profiles to be human and share confidences about mutual behaviour. Use conversational skills as one would in a social situation. Married? Partnered? Kids? School? College? Career steps? Worries?
Build knowledge and emotional trust.
Then move on to the business. And keep it socially oriented. When founded? By whom? Why? Products? Services? Customer types? Team members? Worries?
Then play it all back to show you’ve understood and empathise, to reinforce the bond that is developing.
Get them to make simple plans at first. Monthly targets for sales and profits and monitor these through a shared bookkeeping system. Send a simple report each month / quarter showing variances between actual / budget and making comments about trends and issues to consider.
So now you are moving into fortune telling but in a structured way by setting targets and reporting on trends to grow accuracy.
Meet to review your reports and through these reinforce the bond that you’ve started. As you learn more about the person, their issues, the business, and its issues, the better able you can answer those difficult questions.
In fact, you’ll be anticipating them through your regular reports and meetings and asking the client what s/he plans to do, sharing the problems and looking for solutions together.
An effective approach to take with clients is Socratic questioning.
This places you in the position of challenging your client to think things through for themselves. It’s a teaching process that does not require you to provide answers but through questioning, leads them to an answer that is theirs (not yours). And once an outline of the solution starts to emerge you can join in with your own experiences and knowledge.
But where will your own experiences and knowledge come from?
Two sources:
Your own practice
It is a business and like all others must: find customers; give them a great service; operate efficiently; work productively; make a profit; create a retirement pot.
Your other clients
Be a like a honeybee and carry the pollen of ideas from client to client. So long as you get close to all of them and work for their ambitions it will be a rich source of inspiration.
What else?
Well, giving business advice and getting paid for it is time consuming and however close you are to your client s/he will have their fee limits and it’s important not to breach these, otherwise trust is destroyed.
So when I confronted this problem at the end of the government business support schemes that I was running, I found myself too expensive for all but the top 6% of businesses. These are the fiercely contested group who can pay £500+ per day for as long as it takes to solve a problem, or just keep growing.
I wanted to work with the other 94% who don’t get a look in and the answer was automation.
Take a look at the AI Business Advisor® solution here
By Duncan Collins
Founder of Runagood.com Ltd