I came away from a recent accounting conference thinking about two things that, initially, seemed quite separate.
The first was what small business clients are telling us they want from their accountants. They want to feel understood, and not just through their accounting, tax or financial results. They want us to ask questions about what they’re trying to achieve, why it matters, what’s happening in their world and what they actually want their business to give them.
The second was a conversation about how difficult it can be to move forward when the thing holding us back isn’t what we still need to learn, but what we need to unlearn.
The more I thought about those two things, the more I realised how closely connected they are.
We’re entering a world where technical information and technical services are becoming increasingly accessible. AI will continue to change what our clients can find out, analyse and potentially do for themselves. I don’t think that makes us less important as accountants, but I do think it makes it even more important that we’re clear about where our greatest value can sit.
Strategic business improvement advisory is very different from simply providing another technical service.
To do it well, you need to understand the business, certainly, but also the person behind it. What are they trying to achieve? Why does that matter? Who else is affected by the decisions they make? What is the business giving them and, just as importantly, what is it taking away?
It brings me back to something we say often at The Small Business Project: strategic business improvement advice needs strategic business improvement information.
And quite a lot of that information isn’t sitting in our clients’ accounting software.
When the conversation gets a little more personal
I’ve seen this play out many times in our training.
As accountants, we’re generally very comfortable talking about the business. Revenue, profitability, team, clients, systems, cash flow and growth are familiar territory. We know what to ask and, importantly, we usually have a pretty good idea of what we’re going to do with the answer.
Then we start asking questions about the business owner, and that’s where things can start to feel a little different.
How is the business affecting their life? How is their health? What about their family and relationships? Who are the important people in their world? Are they getting enough time away from the business? What do they want personally from everything they’re working so hard to build?
It’s not because, as accountants, you don’t care about your clients. In my experience, it’s usually quite the opposite. You care deeply about them and value the trust you’ve spent years building, so of course you’re cautious about doing anything that might put that relationship at risk.
You might wonder whether it’s really your place to ask. Whether the client might think you’ve overstepped. Whether a conversation that has always felt safe and professional might suddenly become a little too personal.
Then we get to questions such as, “If we were sitting here in 12 months and nothing had changed, how would that make you feel?”
I’ve seen questions like that create some pretty strong reactions in training rooms over the years. Sometimes they hit closer to home than people expect because, of course, we’re all human too. The questions we’re asking our clients to consider can occasionally make us reflect on our own businesses and lives.
But I don’t think that’s a reason to avoid them. I think it’s a reason to learn how to ask them well.
We’re not trying to become therapists and we’re certainly not digging around in someone’s personal life simply because we can. We’re creating the space for the client to tell us what matters to them, and they decide how much they want to share.
That distinction is important because, done badly, asking personal questions could absolutely feel intrusive. But delivered within a clear strategic process, with genuine curiosity and permission, they can have quite the opposite effect.
They can build trust.
Your client begins to see that you’re not simply interested in whether their business made enough profit this year. You’re interested in whether the business is actually working for them.
And perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by that, because clients are now telling us this is exactly what they want from their advisers.
Then there is the unlearning
If you’re newer to these conversations, there’s naturally a lot to learn. You’ve spent your career being rewarded for knowing the answer, and now I’m asking you to become comfortable asking questions when you don’t necessarily know where the answer will lead.
That’s quite a shift.
But there is also something wonderfully freeing about it. You don’t have to solve everything the client tells you or start mentally building the solution while they’re still talking. Sometimes your job is simply to stay curious long enough to understand what’s really going on.
For experienced partners and leaders, though, the challenge can be quite different because you may already be very good at this.
You’ve been having strategic conversations with clients for years. You know your clients incredibly well, you’ve seen hundreds of businesses and you’ve built up the judgement and pattern recognition that only comes with experience. You can probably sense when something isn’t quite right before the client has even finished explaining it.
Then someone like me comes along with a process and asks you to slow down, follow the steps and perhaps have the conversation differently.
I completely understand why you might wonder whether it’s worth it.
If you’ve been doing this successfully for 20 years, why would you change?
Not because what you’ve been doing is wrong. In fact, your expertise is one of the most valuable assets your firm has.
The reason is that expertise alone isn’t a scalable training model.
You can’t hand 20 years of experience to a manager and say, “Do what I do.” You can’t teach instinct by telling someone to use their instinct, and you can’t expect another adviser to recognise the same patterns you recognise when they haven’t yet had the years of conversations that taught you what to look for.
This is where some unlearning becomes necessary.
A process isn’t there to replace your expertise or turn experienced advisers into robots following a script. It’s there to help make some of what you know teachable.
By putting structure and shared language around the conversation, your team has somewhere to start. They can learn what information they’re looking for, why it matters, which questions help uncover it and what to do next. Then, as they have more conversations of their own, they start building the experience, judgement and confidence that you’ve spent years developing.
That’s how we begin turning individual expertise into firm capability.
And this is where leadership means going first
If you want your team to work this way, there is one thing we can’t ignore.
It can feel uncomfortable.
You’re asking people who have built their careers around technical expertise to move away from the safety of conversations where they know the answers. You’re asking them to explore areas they may never have discussed with a client before, resist the urge to solve the problem and trust a process that is still unfamiliar.
They will be watching what you do.
If the message from the partners is, “This is how we want you to have strategic business improvement conversations from now on,” while you continue having those conversations exactly the way you always have, it’s going to be very difficult for the new approach to stick.
It very quickly becomes something they have to do rather than how we do things here.
One of the simplest rules of leadership is that you can’t ask someone else to do something you’re not willing to do yourself.
And that’s why leadership means going first.
It means being willing to learn the process even when you already know how to have a good client conversation. It means slowing down occasionally when your experience tells you that you already know the answer and asking the question anyway. You might even discover that the client gives you information you weren’t expecting.
It also means letting your team see you practise, adjust and occasionally feel uncomfortable too. Because if they can see an experienced partner willing to learn and do something differently, it gives them permission to be learning too.
That’s very different from telling your team they need to “step up” and do more strategic business improvement advisory, then leaving them to work out what that actually means.
That’s not really delegation. It’s abdication.
There is a much bigger reason to do this
We could finish this conversation by talking about advisory revenue, partner capacity or the commercial opportunity for accounting firms. All of those things matter, and firms absolutely need strategic business improvement advisory to be commercially worthwhile.
But there’s a bigger reason I care so much about this work.
I’ve spent a very long time working with accountants and small business owners, and I know that what shows up in the numbers is often only part of what’s really happening.
A profitable business can still be consuming its owner’s life. Growth can be creating enormous pressure at home. A business owner can know something needs to change without having the faintest idea what the actual problem is. And someone can spend years building a successful business only to realise it isn’t giving them the life they thought it would.
There are also plenty of business owners doing really well who simply haven’t stopped long enough to think about what they want next.
As accountants, we’re in an extraordinary position to have these conversations because the trust is often already there.
And I think that becomes even more important as AI changes our profession.
Our clients will increasingly be able to use AI to understand their numbers, model scenarios, answer technical questions and access information that once required an expert. We shouldn’t ignore that or pretend it isn’t happening.
But AI knowing more about a business isn’t the same as you understanding the business owner.
Understanding what matters to this particular person, why it matters, what isn’t working for them, what they’re not saying and what needs to change requires a very different kind of conversation. It requires strategic information that isn’t necessarily captured in a set of accounts, and a relationship where the client trusts you enough to share it.
I believe that’s an enormous opportunity for our profession.
But we can’t leave that capability sitting with the handful of experienced partners who already know how to do it.
If we can turn individual expertise into something that can be taught, practised and shared across the firm, more accountants can confidently have these conversations. More clients can feel genuinely understood and more small business owners can get access to strategic business improvement support that helps them make better decisions and build better businesses.
For me, that’s what makes the learning worthwhile, even when it feels a little uncomfortable at first. It’s also what makes the unlearning worthwhile, even when you’ve spent years becoming very good at doing things your own way.
Because if we want our teams to come with us, we can’t stand at the other end pointing towards where we want them to go.
Sometimes leadership is much simpler than that.
We have to go first.