Over the past few months, I’ve had a number of conversations with accountants that have made me think differently about why advisory continues to feel so difficult to implement.
When we talk about advisory, we tend to jump fairly quickly to the work itself. What services should we offer? How should we price them? Who in the team has enough experience to deliver them? Where will we find the capacity? What tools or technology do we need?
They’re all perfectly reasonable questions. In fact, they’re questions I’ve spent plenty of time helping accounting firms answer over the years.
But recently I’ve started to wonder whether we’re jumping ahead.
I had a conversation with an accounting partner not long ago who said something I hear in various forms all the time: “Our less experienced accountants can’t really do advisory. They don’t have the technical experience or expertise yet.”
And I completely understand the concern. If I picture a less experienced accountant sitting opposite a business owner, expected to understand everything happening in their business and provide strategic advice on the spot, I’d be nervous too.
But that picture assumes advisory starts with providing the advice.
What if it doesn’t?
What if there are several important steps that need to happen before we ever get to the advice, the solution, the service or the piece of work we eventually deliver?
Because when I look at where so much of our attention has traditionally gone as a profession, I think we may have been starting advisory at Step 4.
The Five Steps to Better Advisory
When I started pulling apart what happens before, during and after a successful advisory engagement, I could see five distinct steps.
They aren’t necessarily five meetings, five services or five more things to squeeze into an already busy day. They are simply five things that need to happen to turn an advisory opportunity into a structured strategic client experience.
1 | QUALIFY
Before we start answering, we need to understand what is really going on. Is there an advisory opportunity here worth exploring further?
2 | PROVE
The client needs to understand the significance of what they’ve told us. Is there a genuine need or desire for something to change, and does it matter enough to take action?
3 | ALIGN
Once we understand what matters, we can determine what help makes sense. This is where the services, scope and pricing connect to what the client actually needs.
4 | DELIVER
Now we get to the part we’re generally most familiar with: doing the work, providing the advice and helping the client move forward.
5 | RE-ENGAGE
Businesses change, priorities shift and new challenges emerge. Re-engaging keeps the conversation going and helps us understand what the client needs next.
None of these steps are particularly complicated. In fact, we’re probably doing pieces of them already.
The interesting part is what happens when we skip the first three and jump straight to the one accountants are naturally very good at.
Deliver.
And I think that’s where some of our long-standing frustrations with advisory start to make a lot more sense.
What happens when we start at Step 4?
Starting at Step 4 doesn’t mean the advisory work itself will necessarily be poor. Accountants are generally very good at doing the work. The problem is that we may arrive at delivery without having done enough to understand why we’re doing it, what the client really needs or whether they’re ready to do anything about it.
And that can show up in all sorts of ways.
We spend time preparing advice for a client who wasn’t particularly interested in doing anything with it. We put together a proposal only to hear, “We’ll think about it.” We struggle to price the work because we’re not entirely sure where the boundaries sit. Or we start delivering and gradually discover there was a lot more involved than we first thought.
Over time, these experiences start creating some very familiar conclusions.
“Clients don’t really want advisory.”
“It’s too hard to price.”
“Advisory always blows out.”
“We don’t have the capacity.”
“Our team aren’t experienced enough to do it.”
Each of those conclusions may contain some truth. But I think they’re also worth looking at through a different lens.
If we haven’t Qualified the opportunity, Proved there is something the client genuinely wants to change, or Aligned the work to what matters to them, we’re asking Step 4 to do an enormous amount of heavy lifting.
Perhaps the problem isn’t always the advisory we’re delivering.
Perhaps sometimes, we’ve simply arrived there too soon.
But what do these steps actually look like in an accounting firm?
The Five Steps might sound like something that belongs around a formal advisory engagement, but that’s not really how advisory opportunities turn up.
They turn up in everyday client conversations.
A client phones and says, “We’re thinking about putting on another employee. Do you think we can afford it?”
As accountants, we’re very good at answering questions. Before the client has finished speaking, our brains are already wandering through wages, superannuation, cashflow and whether the numbers will support another salary.
But the question they’ve asked may not be the question we need to answer. Qualify means getting curious first. What’s prompted them to consider another employee? What’s happening in the business? What are they hoping another person will change? A seemingly simple question might uncover a much bigger issue around capacity, profitability, the owner’s workload or where the business is heading.
And importantly, qualifying isn’t something we only do with new clients or new advisory leads. These advisory opportunities appear in normal client conversations all the time. We just need to recognise them before we rush through them with an answer.
Prove takes that understanding a little further. Perhaps a client tells you the business is going well, but they’re working harder than ever and haven’t had a decent holiday in three years. We could immediately start suggesting ways to fix that. Or we could spend a little more time helping them understand what is happening, what it’s costing them and whether they genuinely want something to change.
If they do, we can Align the help we offer with what we’ve learned. This is where we decide what the client actually needs from us, rather than assuming an advisory opportunity automatically requires a particular service or package. Perhaps we’ve uncovered a margin problem, poor pricing, a capacity issue or an owner who simply can’t get out of the day-to-day running of the business. The work we recommend should make sense in the context of what matters to that particular client.
Then we Deliver.
By the time we reach Step 4, we have a much clearer picture of why we’re doing the work, what we’re trying to achieve and what the client expects from us. Rather than making advisory harder or adding another layer of process, those first three steps should make delivery easier to scope, price and manage.
And finally, we Re-engage.
This is another step I think becomes difficult when we see advisory primarily as delivery. If every client interaction means preparing reports, analysing numbers and providing more advice, it’s understandable that monthly or even fortnightly contact feels impossible. Where would we find the time?
But re-engaging doesn’t mean delivering another piece of work. It means returning to the conversation.
And that conversation may need to happen much sooner than we think. What mattered to a client even a month ago may not be what matters now. Something has changed. A team member has resigned. A large customer hasn’t paid. A new opportunity has appeared. The owner has hit a wall.
A simple “What’s been happening?” can open the door.
That regular rhythm of conversation helps us understand what’s changing, identify when another advisory opportunity is emerging and determine whether anything further needs to happen. Sometimes it will lead back through Qualify, Prove and Align. Sometimes it won’t.
Once you start looking at advisory this way, the Five Steps aren’t five new things to add to an accountant’s workload.
They’re already turning up in conversations every day.
The opportunity is to recognise which conversation we’re in, and resist our very well-trained instinct to jump straight to the answer.
Are we delegating advisory, or abdicating it?
This brings us to perhaps the more uncomfortable part of the conversation: leadership.
I regularly hear partners and firm leaders say they want their managers and accountants to have more advisory conversations with clients. They want advisory to extend beyond the partners, create opportunities for their people to step up and, importantly, reduce the reliance on a small number of senior people to do everything.
All of that makes sense.
But there is an important difference between delegating advisory and abdicating responsibility for it.
Delegation means giving someone responsibility along with the structure, tools, skills and support they need to succeed. Abdication is handing over the responsibility and hoping they’ll work out how to do it.
I don’t think firm leaders deliberately abdicate advisory. The challenge is that many experienced partners learned to advise clients over decades. They built commercial judgement through hundreds, perhaps thousands, of client conversations. They learned what questions to ask, what to listen for, when to dig deeper and when to offer advice. Much of that capability has become instinctive.
So when we ask a less experienced accountant to sit in on those meetings, watch what happens and eventually start having advisory conversations of their own, we’re asking them to somehow turn someone else’s instinct into their own process.
That’s a pretty tough apprenticeship.
And if the only part of advisory we’ve clearly defined is Step 4, the challenge becomes even greater. We’re effectively asking people to jump into the most complex part of the pathway and then wondering why they don’t feel confident enough to do it.
This is where leadership has a responsibility to make the invisible visible.
What does Qualify look like in our firm? What questions help us Prove whether something genuinely matters to a client? How do we Align what we offer before work begins? When should someone Deliver themselves and when should they bring in more experienced expertise? How and when do we Re-engage?
Once those things are defined, they can be demonstrated, practised, supported and gradually delegated.
Because experience is incredibly valuable.
It’s just not a particularly scalable training methodology.
If we want advisory to become something the broader team can confidently participate in, we can’t simply ask them to “do more advisory.” We need to give them a pathway they can actually follow.
Advisory starts before the advice
When we look at advisory through the Five Steps, I think it challenges one of our most deeply held assumptions about what advisory actually is.
We’ve tended to define advisory by the work we deliver: the strategic advice, forecasts, reporting, meetings and solutions we put forward.
But from the client’s perspective, advisory starts much earlier.
It starts when we become curious enough to understand what’s really happening. When we resist the urge to immediately answer the question in front of us and ask a few more instead. When we help a client make sense of where they are, where they want to be and whether there’s a gap worth doing something about.
That distinction matters because it changes the size of advisory in our minds.
If every advisory interaction requires us to have the answers, prepare something, analyse something or deliver another piece of work, advisory will always feel heavy. We’ll worry about capacity and whether our team has enough experience, and naturally limit the number of clients we engage with because we can’t possibly do all that work for everyone.
But not every advisory conversation needs to result in work.
Sometimes the value is in asking another question, helping a client see something they hadn’t seen before, recognising when to bring someone else into the conversation or simply staying close enough to understand what’s changing in their business.
Perhaps better advisory doesn’t require us to keep adding more to Step 4. It requires us to become much better at recognising everything that happens around it.
Because advisory doesn’t start when we provide an answer.
It starts when we take the time to understand the question.
Where does advisory start in your firm?
If this has you wondering whether your firm might be starting advisory at Step 4, we’ve created a simple resource to help you take a closer look.
Are You Starting Advisory at Step 4? walks through the Five Steps to Better Advisory and helps you identify where your current approach is strong, where steps may be getting skipped and where there may be opportunities to make advisory work better for your clients and your team.
👉 Download Are You Starting Advisory at Step 4?
You may find you’re already doing more of the Five Steps than you realise.
The opportunity for leadership is to make those steps deliberate, structured and visible, so you’re your most experienced people do instinctively becomes something others can learn to do too.