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Crafting Your Advisory Service (What Does the Market Want?)

Crafting Your Advisory Service (What Does the Market Want?)

Learn how to identify what your "home-run" client really wants

February 25, 2023

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 984 growth-minded accountants.

This is post #2 in my four-post series on creating and delivering advisory services.

Here's what you can expect:

Feb 18th: What is Advisory & Why Offer It?
Feb 25th (today): Crafting Your Advisory Service (What Does the Market Want?)
Mar 4th: Marketing, Pricing, and Selling Your Advisory Service
Mar 11th: Fulfilling Projects and Building a High Caliber Team

Let's go.

Today I'm going to tell you how to craft an advisory service that meets the market's needs.

Your ideal client has motivations, fears, and pains that you need to unearth. You need this clarity to build a service offering that delivers the value your ideal client desires.

If you do this right, you can build an advisory practice in 12 months that makes up 20-30% of your revenues and runs at a 60-70% margin.

Unfortunately, many accountants struggle to craft compelling advisory service offerings.

We don't understand what our clients actually want

There's no denying we're in this business to help our clients grow. And we think we are doing that by:

Preparing tax returns
Providing monthly bookkeeping and delivering a P&L
Being available for meetings as requested by the client

While this work is important and valuable, what your clients really want boils down to two things:

Feeling safe and secure
Feeling empowered to be more successful

Your client hires you for tax prep rather than DIY'ing it on TurboTax because they desire a feeling of safety.

Your client hires you for monthly accounting because they want to feel empowered to make better financial decisions.

Your client holds a strategy call with you because they want to feel empowered to make decisions that grow their businesses and wealth.

Understanding this resulted in a big "ah ha" moment for me.

It enabled me to craft our offerings and sales conversations around these feelings of security and empowerment. The result has been building an advisory business to a $2M/year run rate at 65% margins.

But first, I had to understand how I could help my clients feel safe and empowered.

Step 1: Identify your ideal client and ask them what they want

At our firm, we know what our "home-run" client looks like.

We know their demographic information, what type of real estate they generally invest in, where they hang out online, and more importantly, exactly how we can help them succeed.

I want you to define your home-run client too. Consider:

Their personality
Their stage of life
Their earnings and wealth
How sophisticated they are
The types of business/investing they engage in
Whether they engage in topical areas that you enjoy
How you can help them (your own technical experience)

Once you have this mapped out, it's time to start market research.

Here's what I'd suggest:

Twitter: search key terms to identify accounts with large followings that talk about topics your home run client is interested in. Follow them and read the comments on their tweets from other users and threads to gain insight into the questions people are asking. Run polls to gather data quickly.
LinkedIn: use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to connect with your home-run clients at scale. Send them a personalized message and ask for their comments on some of your ideas (you'd be surprised how many people will reply when the message is personalized).
Email/Phone: do it the old-school way and email prospective clients or pick up the phone. Ask them what they like about their current accountant and what they feel is missing.
Ask your own clients: reach out to a sub-set of your clients and ask them what they feel is working well and what they feel is missing (that would help them get to the next level).

The goal is to collect data and context so that we can build an offer.

Step 2: Craft your advisory service offer

Now it's time to build your advisory offer.

This is going to be something you present to all of your new home-run clients as they contact you for services. My recommendation is to eventually build three tiers of service but don't worry about doing so right out of the gate.

Start by thinking about the end result.

What transformation are you helping your client through? From there, back into how you can deliver it.

For example, our home-run client wants to know if they made tax mistakes in the past and they want to optimize for taxes in the future as they acquire rental properties.

So we built a tax advisory service around:

Feeling secure: did I make a mistake in the past?
Feeling empowered: can I make smart tax decisions in the future?

To deliver these feelings of safety and security, we crafted a scope that looks something like this:

In the first 45 days of onboarding as a new client, we will:
- Review the past 2-years of tax returns to educate you on how you could have better-optimized taxes.
- Hold three meetings to discuss your current portfolio and plan for the future as well as educate you on tax moves you can make to help accelerate your wealth building
- Deliver a written document that details the key tax strategies you should be focused on (and also ones to ignore)
For the remaining 10.5 months of our engagement:
- You can email us any time, no charge, and we will respond within 24-48 hours
- Short (<10 min) ad-hoc phone calls are fine, we're here for you
- We will give you two scheduled calls to review progress on the tax plan

You may be wondering where our "estimated taxes" or "tax projection" deliverables are.

While we provide them for some clients, we learned most of our clients don't value these deliverables, so they are not included in our basic advisory offering for our home-run clients.

And it feels like a tax advisor sin!

But in reality, we are listening to what our ideal clients want from us and we're delivering that. We're not forcing them to use a service that we think is valuable. You have to leave your ego at the door.

I haven't talked about the price yet, and that's intentional.

As you are working through this step and building the scope of your advisory offer, I want you to leave pricing completely off the table.

Instead, focus on building a scope that delivers on your clients' motivations, fears, and pains.

Think BIG and unique.

If your home-run clients love space, consider booking an annual client event at the Kennedy Space center. Or better yet, hold client meetings as you travel IN SPACE on SpaceX.

You may roll your eyes and think "that's unrealistic and will cost too much!"

Being realistic in a brainstorming phase doesn't lead to innovation. Let the ideas flow and have some fun with it.

Step 3: Create continuous feedback loops

The first scope of your advisory offer will not be your last.

If you implement great feedback loops, you will find that you tweak your scope for your advisory services on a continuous basis to move with changing market needs.

There are two feedback loops that you absolutely must implement:

Sales feedback loop: for every prospective client that was prevented with your advisory offer and didn't sign, why not? Was it price? Was it scope? Did they feel like something was missing or maybe the scope was too much?
Current client feedback loop: as you work with your clients on advisory engagements, ask them what, if it was removed, would not make the advisory service worth it and what, if it was added, would make the advisory service 2x as valuable.

Implement a system to collect this feedback and never get lax with it.

You must continually collect feedback no matter how successful you are at implementing and running this advisory service. Failure to iterate from the collected feedback will lead to an advisory offer that doesn't match the market's needs at some future point.

Upcoming Posts in this Series

Over the coming weeks, here's what you can expect each Saturday:

Mar 4th: Marketing, Pricing, and Selling Your Advisory Service
- How to market and position your service
- How to price your service and consistently test new prices
- We'll walk through my sales framework (and get you out of sales!)
Mar 11th: Fulfilling Projects and Building a High Caliber Team
- How to manage relationships and projects
- How to build a high caliber team to deliver these services

Your homework:

Email me with a draft of your advisory scope and I'll give you some feedback. It will help if you can provide context as to why you feel your scope will meet your client's needs.

That’s all for this Saturday.

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