Chapter One: How to decide which advisory services to offer 
Chapter Two: How to price your advisory services
Chapter Three: Starting the sale
Chapter Four: How to market your advisory services 

Key takeaways:

1. Start planning which services to launch by asking six key questions to find your firm’s sweetspot.
2. Inform your research with market insights about the advisory services clients are likely to demand in 2023.
3. Use your existing compliance work to consider if there’s a clear need for advisory.
4. Choose the advisory services to offer using a simple four-step process.
5. Using Ignition to automate tasks can free-up time to offer advisory services.

In this chapter, we’ll look at how you can start finding your business's sweet spot or ideal customer profile (ICP). We’ll explore how to use your existing compliance work as the basis for considering advisory services you could launch. Knowing which advisory services are in strong demand is also important at this stage – and there’s more on this below. We’ll also describe how these can be used to attract new clients and increase revenue from existing ones. 

Sean M. Duncan, CPA, is the Founder and President of SMD Consulting & Accounting, LLC in North Dallas and the creator of the Chief Proactive Advisor Program. He teaches accounting and tax firm owners how to find their sweet spot. He recommends that accountants wanting to generate more lucrative and meaningful work start by asking themselves:

• What kind of work do I want to do?
• What am I good at?
• What type of client do I want to help?
• What do those clients need?
• What does success look like for me?
• Then create a business plan based on the answers.

Accomplishing the answers does inevitably involve challenges and some investment of time and energy. But it could be a catalyst to many advisory opportunities. Sean M. Duncan, CPA, who uses Ignition in his own practice, pivoted his firm from performing strictly tax prep work, which brought in on average $800 per client, per year in 2017 to more specialized services, such as wealth management and estate planning. He now makes over $10,000 per client, per year. 

The shift has been a win-win for him, his firm, and his clients. He’s achieving his own personal goals to provide more meaningful and impactful services to his clients, and have a positive impact on their lives and their businesses. Sean M. Duncan, CPA’s framework for launching advisory services in his firm is available to read and follow below. 

In my firm Lance CPA Group, we’ve niched down into craft breweries and digital agencies. It’s allowed us to become experts in those industries. We’ve made it our business to get to know these types of businesses, pairing our expertise to meet their unique demands and to help ensure their financial wellbeing.

At the same time as laying the groundwork for your ICP or niche and researching suitable advisory services to launch, it pays to also know which services clients will be clamoring for in 2023. These services are likely to include:

Tax advisory: Helping your clients optimize their tax situation is a service they’re likely to want during the downturn. We did this in our firm and we found we got an overwhelming number of clients that wanted that work and signed up for it. If you’re just doing tax returns right now, ask yourself, ‘how can we expand this out so we’re working with clients throughout the year, helping them with tax planning or tax estimates?’

Cash flow forecasting and advice: If business owners didn’t want this before 2020, they definitely did after lockdowns started happening. The issue here isn’t likely to be convincing clients they need the service – it’s making it clear that it’s a service they need to pay for.

Technology advisory: Many clients are likely to need help with their tech stack – business software is rarely a plug-and-play affair. You’ll need someone with technological expertise to take on this work, but if you already employ such a person or can hire or partner with one, this could offer significant revenue opportunities. 

“You’ll be a hero to your clients if you can handle the tech side of things,” Sean Duncan says. “If your firm can advise, for instance, a medical practice on what practice-management software they should buy, then install it and make sure it integrates with their other software – then provide IT support if any issues arise – that’s something you charge a lot of money for,” he says. 

Client advisory services (CAS), such as virtual CFO: ‘The cloud’ and the SaaS products it has enabled, means it’s never been easier for businesses to outsource back-office functions such as finance to their accounting and tax firm. Few businesses can afford $300,000 for a full-time CFO, but if they want to grow they do need strategic advice. (If you’re considering focusing on client advisory services (CAS), you may want your staff to study for AICPA’s Client Accounting Advisory Services Certificate.)  

“Many businesses want a Virtual CFO and this is something my firm generates a ton of money from,” says Sean M. Duncan, CPA. “But, be it a fractional CFO or controller or anything else, you have to establish clear boundaries around how big the fraction is. Are you spending a few hours helping the client understand their financials and make management decisions every week, month, or quarter?”

Advisory services don’t have to be separate services from those you already offer. In fact, these services could come out of your existing compliance work. If there’s a clear need for an advisory element, there could be an opportunity to service clients in a much better way. 

As I discuss in Choosing the right advisory services for your practice to offer, clients may come to firms with a need such as a tax return, but what they truly want is high-value guidance.

elling additional services to existing clients could allow you to increase revenue from your existing customers. This means leveraging your client relationships, but many accountants struggle with putting it into action. This is often because they don't know where to start or they try to do too much at once. The key is to start small. Don't try to sell every service to every client right away. Even if you are successful and they all agree to it, you may not have the ability to fulfill what you’ve promised. 

Below is a simple four step method to help you kickstart the process for choosing advisory services to offer in your firm. 

Step 1: Understand your client service matrix

First, gain a solid understanding of your current client service matrix by listing all of your clients against all of the services you currently provide. Mark off which of these services your clients are currently using. 

Step 2: Identify services to sell 

Next, ask your team what you should be doing for your clients that you’re not currently doing and that would provide a lot of value. Also identify with your team the typical areas where clients are pulling the firm out of scope. This is a great way of identifying a potential need for services. The services you pinpoint should be ones your team is trained (or can be trained) to deliver.

Step 3: Expand your current offering

When you’ve identified services you could offer, revisit your matrix looking at the industries your clients are in. Consider if your other clients in the same industry have similar demands for the out of scope work you identified in Step 2. This may be an indication that this industry has a certain need, and you could look at expanding to include this offering.

Step 4: Capacity planning and how automation and training play a key role 

Reviewing your current capacity and your team’s overall capabilities is vital in deciding how many of your existing clients you could feasibly provide this service to. Capacity is a precious resource and safeguarding it is essential. You don’t want to over-commit yourself. 

Automation software such as Ignition plays a key role here. Automation is really important because firms don’t have much time. It’s not like we can hire where we want when we want – and firms are struggling to provide advisory services because they’re busy doing the basic work. 

CPA.com’s report, Where Opportunity Meeting Value: Business Model Trends for Accounting Advisory Services, shows firms that automated highly manual tasks, “opened up time for them to provide more advisory type work”. It also allows you to respond or be more proactive with the clients you currently have. 

One of the other capacity challenges firms have with advisory is that it’s still being carried out at partner level or senior level. As a result, they have a lot of requirements on their plate – they’re trying to manage the practice, people, clients. They can never get to that work or feel constrained about the amount of advisory they can really do. 

To overcome this problem I recommend training staff to do advisory work. This opens up the ability to scale this better, but also makes this a more viable opportunity within your firm. It’s less reliant on the partner and more reliant on the staff and the firm to do it.”

Other ways to proactively manage capacity include hiring employees offshore and using value pricing. More of the latter below. 

Key takeaways:

• Soft-launch your advisory services to select clients first, so you can iron out any issues.
• Sell your advisory services using a two-step process for your scoping session, and proposal that includes the all-important letter of engagement.
• With Ignition, you can create impressive online proposals and automated engagement letters that make it simple to engage clients, get paid and run your firm on autopilot.   

One fundamental question underpins all the above points: how should you sell advisory services? In this chapter, we’ll look at the sales process, breaking it down into how to soft-launch your services, followed by a simple two-step process for scoping the work; and creating a proposal and letter of engagement.

Before starting to sell a new service to your client base, consider soft-launching it first. That way you can gather data and iron out any bugs before rolling out the service more broadly, and clients may also sign up for the new service once the trial ends. 

As part of your soft-launch, include one or more testimonials and case studies in marketing emails. Most of the time, your business clients will be delighted to provide a testimonial or participate in a case study because (a) it’s free advertising for their business and (b) they know how important social proof is and have probably made similar requests of their own customers. You can make the process easier for all parties involved by systematizing and automating it.  

To automate tasks in the client engagement and payment process, you can connect your favorite apps to Ignition. This saves time, and minimizes admin, tedious tasks and mistakes. From the moment your client signs your proposal, automated workflows swing into action.

“My senior staff and I have saved countless hours thanks to Ignition,” says Sean M. Duncan, CPA. “[It] integrates nicely with our other software, which means everything can be automated. Once the client has provided the necessary e-signatures on the relevant documents and paid the required upfront fee – and only then – our Ignition software activates the project in our practice-management system. Everything is in writing, which means I spend far less time on calls with upset clients. If there is a dispute, I can be confident I have the paperwork required to claim on my errors and omissions insurance,” he says.      

Naturally, you want to make sure that you get paid for the work you do and not waste valuable time chasing payments. Ignition can take care of this. It allows you to go from proposal to paid, in one place. So, you can collect credit card or ACH information upfront on your proposals. 

Ignition also allows you to automate that process. So, if you sign up a client and you’re going to do monthly accounting services for them at $1,000 per month, now that you have their payment information you can automate invoicing and receive payments without any additional work on your end as a result. 

Since implementing Ignition, customers spend almost half the amount of time managing the client engagement and payment process.

Key takeaways:

• Using one-to-many marketing tactics such as email enables you reach as many prospective clients as possible.
• Use Google search phrases relating to your niche to inspire content such as blog posts that answer prospects’ questions.
• Discover expert insights on digital marketing tactics for your firm in the article, Using a digital marketing strategy to grow your accounting firm.
• Ensure you use a range of tactics and strategies to attract advisory clients and avoid over-relying on social media.
• Use your knowledge of your clients’ business to work out the best time to pitch your services to them. 
• Discover services and additional resources to help you transition to advisory.

Clients may not know your firm offers a service or how they could benefit from it. In this chapter we’ll look at the marketing tools and tactics you can use to get your name and services out there.

You may prefer to market your advisory services through word of mouth referrals, and on a one-to-one basis via a phone call or email. But for the best reach you should consider the following one-to-many approaches.

Using a CRM or marketing tool doesn’t need to be complicated. If you don’t have an existing CRM tool for mass communications then consider using inexpensive and easy-to-use email software such Mailchimp. You can import into these tools a list of emails for the clients that you would like to offer the additional services too. Your email (or emails) should explain clearly:

• The service you want to provide.
• The benefits and value of this service.
• Options available for the delivery of the services (one-off, monthly, quarterly, and so on).

How the clients can contact you for more details or to kickoff the process.

Just as you did during your soft-launch, you could include a case study or testimonial. Proving the value of this service is a great addition to the marketing campaign. Again, offering a free trial for a short period of time works especially well if it’s a fairly new concept to the client. 

Before hitting send, don't forget to make sure you have a follow-up plan in place. How will you keep track of the offer recipients and who has taken it up? Make sure you touch base with those clients that didn’t respond to confirm whether or not they’re interested in the additional services in question.

“Keep in mind that great websites have great content,” says Jennie Moore. “Think: messaging that’s clear, error-free, and meaningful, like tips, blogs, downloadable documents, or other ‘bait’ that hooks your audience and builds trust. Also think: client testimonials and reviews, as those are both a way to build trust and up your position in search engines,” she says.

You can increase your website’s visibility when people search on Google by creating content that’s targeted to your clients. If you are targeting brewery owners for example, you might search for phrases such as ‘how to set up taproom financial reporting’. By answering the questions that come up in the search results, you can provide valuable information to your target audience and establish yourself as an expert in your field.   

A digital strategy is using technology to improve your business performance. In this Ignition article on Using a digital marketing strategy to grow your accounting firm, Jennie Moore describes how to scale your firm’s growth using digital marketing tactics.

Knowing what you should do to take your business to the next level is a lot different to actually putting it into practice. But with Ignition, you can spend less time on time consuming administrative work. Ignition makes the transition to engaging advisory clients easier, and allows you to get paid and run your accounting firm on autopilot. 

Want to find out more how Ignition can improve efficiency, optimize your revenue and deliver seamless experiences for your advisory clients? Sign up for a free 14-day trial.