Most practices moving into advisory are already doing the work. It is happening in the margins of compliance, and it is free.
Ask a principal why the firm has not moved further into advisory and the answer is usually about capacity, or about clients not wanting to pay for it.
Neither is often the real reason. Sit in a practice for a week and you will hear advisory work happening constantly. The call after the year-end numbers land. The question about whether now is the time to take on another two staff. The cash flow worry that comes up while the client is signing something else entirely.
That is advice. It is given by the person best placed to give it, to a client who trusts them enough to ask. It is also unbilled, unscoped and unrecorded, which are three descriptions of the same problem.
Compliance leaves an artefact. Advice does not.
A set of accounts exists. A lodged return exists. A client can see them, a partner can review them, and an invoice can point at them.
The advice given in the phone call afterwards exists only as a memory, and only for the two people who were on the call. By the next quarter one of them has forgotten the specifics and the other half remembers a conversation that was useful.
You cannot bill a memory. More importantly, you cannot renew one. When the engagement comes up again there is nothing to show for the advisory half of the relationship, so the conversation defaults back to the work that produced documents.
This is why practices that try to move into advisory by selling harder usually stall. The problem is not the pitch. The problem is that the service has no shape, so there is nothing to sell twice.
The four moments it already happens
Worth checking against your own week, because the list is usually familiar:
- After the numbers land. The client asks what they mean. You tell them, accurately and for free, and the insight evaporates.
- Before a decision. Hiring, a lease, a piece of equipment. You are asked whether it is affordable, which is a question about the plan, not about the accounts.
- When something goes wrong. Cash is tight, a customer has not paid, a quarter has gone badly. The call is reactive and the advice is good.
- At the deadline, sideways. The real conversation happens in the ten minutes after the compliance conversation finishes.
Four moments a year, per client, in a practice with eighty clients, is a great deal of advice given away. Not because anybody decided to, but because none of it was written down.
What changes when it leaves a record
The shift is smaller than it is usually made to sound. It is not a new service line, a new team or a productised offer with a name. It starts with recording what you already say.
A written plan for the client, with three or four objectives for the year and a measure against each. A quarterly review where you say what moved, what did not and what you would do about it. A record of what you asked the client to do and whether they did it.
Three things happen once that exists.
The client can see the advice. Not the conversation, the advice: the recommendation, the reasoning, what changed since last time. Value they can see is value they will pay for, and value they cannot see is goodwill.
The work becomes repeatable by someone else. A written plan can be prepared by a manager and reviewed by a partner. A conversation held in a partner's head cannot be delegated, which is why advisory capacity in most practices is capped at the number of partners.
And it renews. A quarterly cycle with a record behind it is an engagement. A series of helpful calls is a favour, and favours are not renewed, they are just continued until somebody gets busy.
Who this does not suit
If your clients only contact you at deadlines and never between them, the demand is not there yet and this will not create it. Building advisory demand from a pure compliance relationship is a different project, it takes years, and it usually starts with a small number of clients rather than the book.
If the practice is at capacity on compliance and nobody has an hour a quarter per advisory client, adding a plan to review will make things worse rather than better. The capacity question is real, it is just not usually the one that is blocking.
And if the advice you give is genuinely transactional, answering a question and closing it, there may be nothing to turn into an engagement. Some relationships are exactly what they look like.
Where to start
Pick three clients you already advise informally. Write each of them a one-page plan with three or four objectives and a measure against each. Review it quarterly, in a meeting you schedule in advance rather than one that happens by accident.
You are not adding a service. You are recording the one you have been giving away, which is the part that makes it billable, delegable and renewable, in that order.
That is what Empiraa GPS for Professional Services is built to hold: the client plan, the quarterly review, the actions you asked for and the record of what moved. If the direction is a formal virtual CFO offer, the same structure is what that is built on.
