The Accounting Channel Silver Bullet - A Software Parable

Welcome back to Partnering With Accountants. If you haven’t read the introduction to the series and what you'll get out of it, you can access it here. We open the series with a parable highlighting key mistakes software providers make in working with accountants.

The Accounting Channel Silver Bullet - A Software Parable

I’m meeting Oscar for lunch. He’s been introduced by a friend as someone who could benefit from my insights and advice. According to LinkedIn, Oscar is the Founder of FlourishApp. A quick look at their website yields nothing. It’s just a landing page with the message: “Get ready, the revolution is coming”.

Oscar and I meet and exchange pleasantries.

“So, tell me about FlourishApp”, I ask.

“Basically, it harnesses the power of big data, natural language processing and sentiment analysis to derive machine-learned insights that can then feed artificially intelligent recommendations”, he replies with a proud, smooth, almost velvety air.

I’ll need to try a different approach.

“Okay thanks, who does it benefit?”

“Small business owners”, he responds, almost abruptly.

“Great. What does it help them do?”

“It’s an app that asks them a series of questions about their priorities and how they are feeling about their lives. Then based on their responses it asks them a series of additional questions to help them find a solution.”

“Interesting, kind of like a life coach?” I reply.

“Exactly.” Oscar excitedly answers. “There’s a huge opportunity here. We’re creating a whole new category - Coaching Lives as a Service. It’s still very early days in terms of this market. People are naturally going to be reticent about trusting a software solution for this. But we’re going to address that point head-on in our marketing. Our tagline is ‘FlourishApp - you can trust us, we’re a CLaaS act’”.

I try to quietly take a few deep breaths through the nose. “Calm down, calm down,” I tell myself. “Business success is, sadly, about more than just the ability to pun well”. The euphoria gradually subsides.

I ask Oscar how I can help. He’s keen to draw upon my experience of working with accounting firms.

“Accountants will be a great channel for us,” says Oscar, really emphasising the word ‘will’. As he does so, he dips his chin and maintains an intense gaze. He takes a split second pause. A pit stop for his mind control powers, I’m guessing. At this point, I’m half expecting him to rip off a latex mask to reveal he is in fact Derren Brown.

He doesn’t. And continues, “the beauty of Flourish is that it can benefit any small business owner. And accountants have loads of small business clients”.

“How will accountants work with Flourish?”, I ask.

“There will be two ways”, Oscar opens. “They will either introduce it to clients who will then use the software themselves. Or they will set the client up on the software and use the insights from it as the foundation for delivering 1on1 life coaching sessions. I’ve read a bit about accountants becoming trusted business advisers. It seems like a no-brainer progression for them to move from this to full-on life coaching. Or as I like to say: ‘It’s one small step for the accountant, one giant leap for their service offering and their clients’”.

I make a mental note to find out later where Oscar buys his fortune cookies.

“Interesting”, I say. “A couple of follow up questions. Firstly, are you aware of any accountants who are currently delivering life coaching to their clients? And secondly, where are accountants going to get the skills to do this?”

“Yeah I’ve spoken to a couple of accountants who are really interested in delivering life coaching”, replies Oscar. “And as for the skills. It’s not that difficult really. It’s just about listening and then asking good questions. If they need it, there are plenty of life coaching academies out there.”

I decide I don’t have the heart to probe what ‘really interested’ means and let that pitch pass without swinging.

“So to summarise. Accountants will start to offer life coaching as a new service to their small business owner clients. And they will either self-teach themselves or will independently source and pay for training on how to deliver it”, I say.

“Yes”, replies Oscar confidently. 

Our food arrives and we exchange small talk over lunch. After we’ve finished our food, I decide to go into a bit more detail about the commercial thinking.

“Tell me a bit about the planned offering for accounting firms”, I open.

“So Flourish retails at ￡50 per month per business owner”, Oscar starts. “We will give accountants the opportunity to buy at a 50% wholesale discount, starting at a minimum of 50 licences for ￡1,250 per month. So whether they use it as part of their life coaching service or on-sell it to clients, it’s a win-win.”

“And what services and support are you going to provide to help them make use of those licences?”, I ask.

“We’ve got some really good material about the product that we’re going to put in our help centre. And we’re just designing a new onboarding overlay to go in the product”, replies Oscar proudly, sitting back upright in his chair.

“Let’s talk about your target firms”, I start. 

Before I can continue, Oscar interjects. “Clearly, we want to be working with firms who have small business clients” he snaps with somewhere between half and fully naked contempt.

“Sure”, I say. “But are you thinking this is for large multi-partner or smaller firms? And what services do they already need to be offering clients to have the relationship to recommend Flourish and/or their life coaching service: virtual finance function, trusted business adviser with regular meetings, digital finance transformation or just yearly/quarterly compliance work?”

For the first time, Oscar is silent.

Somewhere in the far off distance a siren wails.

Our time is almost up. I move things onto the comfortable home turf of the product. Oscar shares where they’ve got to so far.

“Have any accountants had demos of the product?”, I ask

“Yeah, they loved it”, replies Oscar, delivering a buy one get one free on question answers.

“Any feature requests?” I ask casually.

“Yeah a few”, answers Oscar, squeezing more than your average number of syllables into ‘yeah’. “We’ve told them they’re all coming soon in the next few months. Our plan is to sell a load of the partner packages over the next few months, raise a massive round of funding, then hire a bigger team to deliver that roadmap”.

I close by asking whether there’s anything else I can help with. 

I immediately regret asking the question, as Oscar eagerly replies. “Now that you know what we’re up to with Flourish, I’d really love it if you could introduce us to as many accounting firms as possible.”

My stomach turns over on itself. Reputational risk insurance isn’t a thing. But even if it were, I’m confident no insurer would be willing to offer cover on this one.

I strike for considerate diplomacy. “I think there are probably a few things you need to get sorted with your proposition first. I wrote a series on Partnering With Accountants that I think you’d really benefit from having a read of. I’ll send through the links and we can go from there.”

Oscar shrugs his shoulders in implied acceptance. We exchange niceties and part ways.

The Post Mortem

Let me first stress one thing clearly. “The Accounting Channel Silver Bullet” is a fictional story and an extreme one at that. Oscar and Flourish are entirely a product of my imagination. He and they are not based on any individual person or business. But the underlying flaws in his thinking about how to work with accountants are all too real:

• The inability to communicate clearly what problem Flourish solves for clients;
• The complete lack of understanding, or interest, in how accountants work with their clients;
• The skills required for accountants to deliver a service with Flourish and a lack of realism about how that gap is going to be filled;
• Selling blocks of licences without providing accountants with the support to make use of them. This will cause either a failure to sell in the first place, or build a tidal wave of future churn;
• Over-promising on future product development, which all software vendors do to some degree. But without any empathy for the issues this causes for accountants who introduce the product to their clients.

Oscar’s approach is that of a hard sales wolf in partnersheep’s clothing (Oscar’s turn of phrase legacy lives on). He sees only the silver bullet multiplier of accountants into their client base. He is blind to the requirements of partnership that are needed to help him reach those clients in an enduringly successful way. 

This is Oscar’s first and only appearance in the Partnering With Accountants series. In subsequent posts, we will go into practical and conceptual frameworks to address those requirements of partnership that Oscar was so blind to. Stay tuned.

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An additional open invitation

I’ve benefited hugely in my career, not least in producing this content series, from the generous advice of others. I’m always happy to share my knowledge and insights. If you have anything you’d like to discuss, details of how to contact me are on my LinkedIn profile.

Thank you

A massive thank you to Andrew Jordon, Ben King, Brad Ewin, Cheryl Sharp, Dan Cockerton, Della Hudson, Emma Fox, Glen Foster, Hilary Dyson, Joe David, Matt Flanagan, Nick Levine, Paul Barnes, Richard Sergeant, Rob Collings, Steve Ash and Stuart Hurst for helping to shape the raw material for this series into its finished form. I’ve been blown away by both the generosity and quality of your insights.