From Transactional to Transformational: How to Activate Your Advisory Services

By Kristen Keats, CPA + Renee Daggett, EA.

For tax professionals, “advisory service” is a term that can be both vague and intimidating. However, it is very likely that you are already offering these services without realizing it.

Think about it: If you fill out a tax return for your customers and give them options for retirement planning, that’s consulting work. Sharing business updates with a client and providing insights into tools such as accounting software or cloud technology is also a consulting service.

In simple terms, advisory service means that you act as an advisor to your clients in any way that goes beyond transaction tax compliance. While almost every tax professional does this, many, particularly younger professionals who fear they lack expertise, have difficulty identifying and accepting this work.

Here are three tips to help you understand, embrace, and grow your advisory services and transform your client relationships from transactional to transformational.

Build your customer community

Establishing your consulting role starts with building a culture of communication and support within your client network.

In the beginning, small business owners often don’t have a community they can rely on to share ideas, discuss techniques, or get honest critiques of their practices. As someone who serves other clients in similar positions, they will look to you as a lifeline for real industry insight and actionable advice.

This is your opportunity to be a helper and use your position as a consultant to answer questions on everything from tax compliance and financial planning to technology and human resources. You might not realize how much you know until you take stock of the business knowledge you’ve gleaned from simply chatting with your customers.

The more you can apply this transferable knowledge, the easier it will be to transform your relationships and anticipate what one customer needs based on another. It will also make the value of your consulting services more understandable to clients who believe they only want tax compliance work.

Find the culture of your company

As you build trust in your customer network, it’s critical that you also consciously engage with the culture you’re trying to foster in your own company.

After two years of transition, first with going out of the office and now with combinations of remote and hybrid work, most companies have finally settled into their long-term work structures. Whether you run a small business in a remote location or a larger operation with an office, now is the perfect time to assess how your company culture is affecting your hiring and staffing goals.

While it’s important for someone to be able to reconcile a balance sheet or file a tax return, you should focus on making sure they fit your culture. If you want a culture that values ​​advisory relationships, look for someone who enjoys connecting dots and is curious to expand beyond compliance work.

Be mindful of your hiring because while it may be tempting to hire quickly and get a spot, the wrong hire will end up costing you more and could disrupt the culture of cohesion you’ve worked so hard to foster. Remember that you can always teach someone skills, but you cannot teach them whether or not they will adopt your core values.

Transform with technology

Technology is the glue that will ultimately increase consulting efficiency for both your clients and your team.

For remote teams, using collaboration tools like Loom and Miro is so important to make people feel like they’re working together, not alone. Even if you don’t want to have too many meetings, these tools allow teams to easily meet with managers for 1:1 meetings, departments, and the whole team. For customer service, QuickBooks Online Accountant allows you to manage and organize tasks asynchronously, all in the cloud.

Unless you consider yourself “tech savvy,” integrating new tools can seem daunting. But to keep innovating your business and not being left behind, you must be willing to embrace change. Move slowly but deliberately. If you find a technology solution that might work for you, review it first and then slowly start implementing it in your organization (make sure this is after tax season—don’t start in January).

Be aware that there is always a hump to overcome when embracing anything new. Expect that initial learning curve and set a schedule with expectations so you don’t get discouraged. Then use that timeline to evaluate the technology, and don’t be afraid to draw a line in the sand if something doesn’t work well for your business.

You know you’ve found the right technology when collaborating with your clients and team members takes just a few clicks.

Conclusion:

Number crunching is often the safe place for tax professionals, so it’s not surprising that stepping into an advisor’s footsteps can be daunting.

Remember that your knowledge base is so much broader than you realize and that your current relationships have already prepared you for success as an adviser and confidante.

As you focus on community, foster a consultative culture, and leverage the tools that facilitate collaboration, you’ll find your relationships move from transactional to transformational.

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Renee Daggett, EA, is CEO of AdminBooks and a former member of the Intuit Tax Council. Kristen Keats, CPA is the owner of Sherwood Tax and Accounting and founder of Breakaway Bookkeeping and Advising.