How to coach your client

For Accountants Guiding Business Owners along the Advisory Pathway

You’ve now achieved the rhythm of producing monthly (never less than quarterly) management accounts showing your client’s performance against budget. So it’s time to shift your emphasis from ‘doing’ to ‘advising’.

This is where you start collaborating to understand what the numbers are saying and drilling into them, to see and discuss the business origins of the financial outcomes.

For example, you may be seeing that new sales are consistently below budget. Or that repeat sales are falling short. There may be system inefficiencies depressing profits. People productivity might be low, also depressing profits. All of which you can see from the management accounts.

Share those insights with your client, so s/he starts to see the impact on the bottom line of how these functions are managed. Now change gear and ratchet your implementation down to ‘Coaching’. This will eliminate the consultancy fee you’ve been charging to set it all up. Because if you don’t, the client will, damaging your long-term relationship.

You now enter a new status as ‘trusted advisor’, setting actions for the client to take. Here is their guidance from Runagood® Action Plans.

In the next post I’ll be looking at how to identify the actions needed when the management accounts uncover a business problem that needs solving.

Practical stuff from AI Business Advisor® See the series here