DO YOU HAVE PERMISSION TO BE A BUSINESS ADVISOR?
TRACTiON - Business Advisory Practice Development
TRACTiON will transform your Business Advisory & Consulting practice and help you succeed as an advisor.
How are you showing up in the marketplace?
Do you present to your clients as a 'business advisor'?
Do you still present as an accounting team that 'dabbles' in business advisory?
Or worse yet, do your new and existing clients even know you offer advisory services?
One of the key pillars for your business advisory service needs to be?Brand Permission.
As an accountant, you have likely established a reputation for being a trustworthy, detail-oriented, and highly skilled accounting and finance advisor. However, many clients seek more than traditional accounting services in today's competitive business landscape. They want strategic guidance and expert advice to help them grow and achieve their business goals. Building brand permission as a business advisor is critical to your success.
What is Brand Permission?
Brand permission refers to the extent to which a company's brand is associated with certain qualities, values, or attributes in the minds of its target audience. It is the extent to which customers give a company?"permission"?to be associated with specific concepts or characteristics. For example, a clothing brand, like Rolex or Louis Vuitton, associated with high quality and luxury, has brand permission to charge premium prices for its products. For you as an accountant, that means ensuring the market trusts and views your and your practice as credible, reliable and highly knowledgeable?business advisors not just accountants.
Common Problems Encountered by Accountants When Creating Brand Permission
One common problem is the tendency for clients to view accounting services as a commodity within a competitive or intermediate market, leading to price-driven decision-making. Accountants have operated under chargeable hours since the dawn of time when the abacus was in use. However, Business advisory services need to exist within a value-based market. In this market, clients aren't "buying your time" but pursuing an outcome. They are not concerned about "how" the work is achieved but more about the accuracy of the outcome to their needs. Examples include consulting, designs, and innovative or high-end products.
Another big challenge is the perception that accountants only provide compliance-focused services or need more expertise to offer strategic business advice:
"My accountant helps me spend less time worrying about my accounts and rest easy knowing I'm safe from ATO headaches."
Your offering needs to be more evident in its reliability or credibility in areas such as people, product, marketing, sales, leadership, management, and business strategy.
Business owners seek the most obvious, not necessarily the correct, solution to what they "think" their problem is:
This "gap" is where those pesky "business coaches" tend to swoop in and steal your existing clients with their business coaching/advisory offerings. Business coaches often have solid sales & marketing functions that promote their personal brand as having a broad skill set and often "lived" experience that addresses these personal and business needs more holistically. They position themselves as more "relevant" alternatives to many scenarios and actively communicate the desired outcomes of the client and the resolution of the challenges in achieving them.?
By understanding the brand permission associated with your firm's brand, you can tailor your marketing, lead generation, services and pricing strategies better to meet the needs and expectations of your target clients. So, how can you start to build your brand permission as a Business advisor???
Here are 7 steps to guide you in Building Brand Permission as a Business Advisor
2. Define your brand: Develop a brand message that communicates the unique value you bring to clients?beyond traditional accounting services. Eg. "Let us help you build the business you've always dreamt of" - The Entourage
3. Develop a content marketing strategy: Share your expertise through blogs, whitepapers, social media, and webinars to establish yourself as a thought leader in your space. Ensure your content focuses on your target audience's specific challenges and needs and how your business advisory team can solve them.
4. Leverage customer testimonials: Ask satisfied clients to share their positive experiences working with you and use their feedback to build social proof and credibility. Use platforms such as Google reviews, Trustpilot, or even the Client Choice Awards by George Beaton and the team at Beaton , to easily gather direct feedback from your clients.
5. Foster strong relationships: Focus on building trust and rapport with your clients. Set strong standards as a business advisor, and be agile, responsive, transparent, honest and open to feedback to help develop your client relationships.
6. Develop a reputation for expertise: One of the key success indicators for a phenomenal advisor, is having a growth mindset - resourcefulness and willingness to independently develop your understanding of core performance areas of exposure. Pursue professional development opportunities to expand your advisory skills and knowledge base, attend conferences, join industry organisations and build your own "advisory" community to help you stay current on emerging trends and best practices.
7. Position yourself for growth: Develop a strategy to help you expand your service offerings in a way that aligns with your brand, the needs of your target audience and the critical resources for your practice. Developing this strategy may take a lot of work to do on your own internally, so if you need help to bring your strategy to life, seek expert, independent advice on setting up and implementing a plan for your practice. After all, you understand more than most the importance of having a fantastic business advisor to help you achieve your goals.
To succeed as a business advisor and build a thriving service offering within your practice, you must develop your brand permission and position yourself as a trusted business advisor who can offer strategic guidance to clients beyond traditional accounting services.
Remember to focus on your unique value proposition, foster strong relationships with your clients, and establish yourself as a thought leader. With time and effort, you can successfully transition from being seen as "just an accountant" to a valued business advisor.
Building brand permission won't be easy, but it will be worth it.?
How would your clients describe you? Do you have their permission to be their business advisor?
We'd love to hear about your business advisory brand and how you are showing up for your clients. If you feel you need support feel free to reach out to our team for a chat with Brad Eisenhuth or Aidan Parsons