A step-by-step guide to rolling out advisory services

Josie Attard, one of our Cloud Advisors, is a chartered accountant and Senior Business & Cloud Consultant for the award-winning accounting firm, Morrows Group, based in Melbourne. Josie had to roll her sleeves up and design her own strategy to roll out advisory services across the practice. This blog summarises everything she wished she had known before she got started…

Step 1 – Pick your team

Don’t be the only champion internally. I did and it was too difficult so please learn from my mistake here. Transforming your practice with the cloud, let alone to be advisors, is challenging enough. If you have too much reliance on one person you’re opening yourself up to failure no matter how much effort and hours you invest.

Step 2 – Share your vision

If you want to change, you need to make sure people are on the same journey. I wrote a vision document which can be a simple one-pager. This allowed me to communicate with the team (who ranged between 20-40 year olds) what we were trying to achieve. The minute they see how easy it is and what our future will be for them and the client the engagement and support is so much better. Clients want this – this gets it moving!

Step 3 – Get hands on

Get your team using it immediately. It took me so much longer to realise that than I would have liked. This was ‘hands down’ the best thing we did. As soon as the partners realised that the software was easy to use, everyone got excited because the fear of change is rapidly unravelled.

This was the single most brilliant thing we did to get mass adoption across the firm. Rest assured you and your team are not going to break it, so get stuck in and enjoy!

Step 4 – Don’t get trapped at your desk

The headline could have also been ‘have an open door policy’. The entire point of this is that your team need to see and feel this and they need to know that they can come to your cloud advisory team for answers to any questions they have. I made a point of working 1:1 with our staff and talking to them about their clients, getting Boards set up for them and then working with them on it. What does the board tell us? How can we help the client? Keep sharing what is working internally in your firm and for other CrunchBoards partners and make it personal to them.

Step 5 – Templates ease you in

CrunchBoards’ pre-built templates have to be your starting point as all the hard work has been done for you. So, get stuck in with these or build your own. Copy and bulk edit are your best friends! This allows you to build a Board and duplicate it across all your clients in minutes.

There is a mental mind-shift the firm and your clients need to go through. But you can see how easy this is by bridging the gap between what they know and understand.

Step 6 – Pricing packages

All clients get an engagement scope at Morrows – no matter what the project is. We are looking to address their needs with a proposal.

Looking back now we have a long term and short term strategy for advisory pricing.

Short-term

Example: Client needs a cashflow for the Bank and wants our help

Package: We built a bespoke pricing package for this need and tailored it around a plan

Long-term

Example: Client was working in 6-month periods and had no handle on cashflow but they wanted to do everything in-house

Package: We embraced their need and tailored the proposal to focus on training and initial set-up

It's important to be flexible when introducing clients to new services, not say, well thanks but no thanks. We changed the scope from working together to us training them. They were so excited that they could see where and how they could grow and invest.

What’s important here is that we watch them in the background. The alerts are so nifty! We can monitor them and give them the odd call about what’s happening. It doesn’t take any time and the alerts go straight to your inbox. We build goodwill with the client and the relationship, just like the other Cloud Advisor James Solomons and Rebecca Mihalic shared in their webinar with CrunchBoards. You can watch that too.

Step 7 – Remember that you’re selling your service not software

Please don’t talk about advisory with clients just show them. You are not selling a software subscription. CrunchBoards is just our tool and we are selling our services. So “absorb” it and get started. It will pay you back multiple times over. Every client on Xero gets CrunchBoards, if we don’t take that step we are not changing our firm or opening up the opportunity to increase client fees.

Step 8 – Sharing it with clients

We have tried so many different ways to do this and I’m sure it will depend on what is right for you. Ultimately, you want to start a conversation. The more you know about their business, the quicker you can find the pain points that you can help them overcome.

a little more about me....

I would never have thought 10 years ago I would be doing what I now do.

Embrace technology and using it help all types of business achieve their goals, whether it be financial or simple improving lifestyle by giving their life back with less time spent on the boring parts of the business.

"dont be afraid of talking to your clients and their future, dreams and hopes"

I've now played a key role with Crunchboards and 18mths ago moving onto Xero, which now 18 months down the track see all the rewards from this triumph, oh and yes we won 100% Xero for 2016, which I must say I was very proud to have achieved.

I love what i do and helping Businesses and Firms to that business to new heights with the amazing technology that we have at our fingertips, taking the pain out of doing what needs to be done. "Let the technology do the heavy lifting for you!!"

Thank you @Xero and @Crunchboards for helping do what I love doing so much easier.