Why the Institutes & Gurus Misunderstand Business Advice
The professional institutes, the gurus, and the accountant advice community, hold out the prospect of easy diversification into the business advisory market.
Googling ‘business advisory software for accountants’, gets 8.7m results. By the time you get to page 3 you’ve seen 60 already, half of them ads. Most irrelevant.
Because business consultancy is my core skill, I look at every one that gets on my radar in the hope of finding another one that really does enable an accountant to give business advice to clients.
And I’m still looking.
What’s on offer for accountants to use with clients comes in three forms:
Online bookkeeping – management accounts – graphs of performance metrics – areas of the business to pay attention to – fact sheets and articles about things to consider in seeking improvement.
Business compliance consultancy – H&SW – GDPR – Employment Act – data security – ISO9000 – Companies Act.
Referrals to specialist consultants who only know how to do one thing eg websites – SEO – Adwords – social media – email marketing – telesales – graphics - HR – IT – funding – grants – insolvency
Useful, but all about compliance with regulation or systems.
None solve the real and practical problems that small businesses confront like “what actions can I take to:
Get more customers?
Get more repeat sales?
Give a better service?
Work more efficiently?
Buy the right technology?
Get more commitment from my people?
Raise their productivity?
Increase profits?
Improve cashflow?
Overcome a crisis?
Exit?
Grow?
Get a life
Diversify?
This is the difficult stuff – too scary to risk getting into.
And the ability to answer these critical needs with constructive stuff that can be implemented immediately is beyond anything I’ve seen.
Yet it’s what a good business consultant has to do, rolling up their sleeves to work inside, making things happen. Small business owners only turn to them, when things are desperate, when their accountant has exhausted one or all of the 3 approaches above and something concrete has to be done and quickly, in the name of survival.
Business consultants are much maligned, as there are no professional qualifications or skills training for them. Too often, they are redundant managers between jobs with none of the required skills. By which I mean the ability to analyse the overall performance of any business – spot the causes of its underperformance - plan the solutions – sell it to the boss and crucially, execute it hands-on until performance improves, then train him / her to take over.
There are few consultants who can do that and those that can, often don’t like working with small businesses. Medium / large ones being far more lucrative.
So, any would-be developer of business advisory software must start with a personal understanding of these realities.
They need to have run their own business to know the pain of fighting to survive and finding solutions. They need to have advised many businesses from inside, sharing the highs and lows, finding answers, and motivating the people to keep going. They must have a toolkit of techniques that they can use competently to solve problems and implement the processes of discovery, analysis, planning and practical implementation.
The business advisory dichotomy is that people without these attributes are writing the software and basing it on accountancy rather than consultancy knowledge.
Just as with accountancy, where software helps the accountant to accelerate the delivery of what s/he already knows how to do, so consultancy software is the same. It is only useful (and usable) if used by someone who understands consultancy.
And that is why, having spent a personal £1m developing consultancy software that covers every single aspect, in the hope that accountants could use it ‘out of the box’, I had to give in and introduce consultancy training first!
It has been an interesting journey to see how accountants adapt to consultancy. The principal difficulty is psychological, about stepping into the future. The client wants a route forward with all the uncertainty that entails whilst the accountant comes from a background of defining a certain past. It’s daunting.
We start with personality profiling to understand self, the client types, and adaptive behaviour that builds trust. We proceed to selling skills and then the processes to use during project implementation: mentoring – coaching – consulting – training – project management.
Role play and working with real businesses builds operating confidence – then we add the technology that does all the hard and time-consuming work of analysis – forecasting – planning – methods – action steps and implementation.
At which point the software makes complete sense and creates a powerful mix of technology and humanity to genuinely introduce business advisory diversification for accountants.
There is nothing else like it on the market…
By Duncan Collins
Founder & CEO of Runagood.com Ltd