A Top 100 Accountant’s process for high value client engagement

Fathom's Expert Series featuring Geni Whitehouse

Founder, The Impactful Advisor ; Consultant, Brotemarkle, Davis & Co LLP ; and President, Information Technology Alliance (ITA)

Advisors are driven by the desire to help clients thrive and succeed.

Geni Whitehouse CPA, a distinguished Accounting Today Top 100 Accountant, takes us through her proven process for using Fathom's Goalseek dashboard to open up conversations with clients and help their businesses grow.

Geni's process helps advisors be more confident to engage with clients and ask questions to improve business performance.??

“Businesses really appreciate the insights. We have all these magical pieces of information that we haven't figured out how to translate so that the client can do anything with it. And that's why it's great to have tools like Fathom that let us convert or translate the language of accounting into visual images that CEOs and businesspeople can actually understand.” Geni Whitehouse, CPA

Step 1: Starting the client relationship on the right foot??

Before diving into the technical aspects of cash flow and profitability, prioritise understanding the client's business and objectives. In the onboarding process, ask questions that reveal the purpose or emotional reasons behind why a client chose to become a business owner.??

Step 2: SCOPE grid to identify critical areas??

Geni uses the SCOPE grid to identify five critical aspects of the business:??

• $ (Finance): Understanding financial challenges and goals.??
• Customers: Identifying areas that affect customer satisfaction and retention.??
• Operations: Addressing inefficiencies in day-to-day operations.??
• People: Evaluating staffing and team-related concerns.??
• End in Mind: Ensuring alignment with long-term objectives and goals.??

Step 3: Using Fathom for interactive conversations??

Fathom allows financial data to be visually presented as well as interactively demonstrate how variables impact cash flow.

Using a demo company or the client's actual financial data, Geni walks clients through various scenarios to show the effects of different financial decisions.??

Step 4: Pulling 'business levers' in Goalseek???

The Goalseek tool in Fathom is a game-changer. Clients can set a financial goal, such as achieving positive cash flow, and advisors can use the Goalseek dashboard to show clients the levers they can push to reach that goal.

This interactive dialogue creates a deeper understanding of the financial implications of different decisions.???

Step 5: Analysing the impact of various strategies??

Use Fathom's Goalseek dashboard to walk clients through different strategies to increase cash flow. For example, while selling more stock might seem like an intuitive solution, Goalseek reveals that without addressing other factors, it could lead to negative outcomes.

Instead, focusing on improving margins, raising prices, optimising inventory, and reducing accounts receivable could have a more significant positive impact on cash flow.??

Geni has developed a ‘Strategies to Action’ spreadsheet: a collection of questions advisors can ask clients to help drive conversations around business performance. This training resource is available to download from Fathom's Expert Series page.

Step 6: Incorporating balance sheet items??

Many business owners tend to overlook balance sheet items when assessing cash flow. Fathom allows advisors to visually demonstrate how adjusting collection times, vendor payments, and inventory growth can dramatically influence cash flow.??

Step 7: Empowering the client's team to drive success??

The power of Fathom is how it enables engagement with business owners as well as their teams. Geni's top tip is to communicate financial insights to the client's team, to assign owners to specific improvement areas, and to foster a collaborative effort toward achieving financial goals.

This process allows me to bridge my accountant way of thinking about the information with the client's way. That's when everybody wins and that's when clients see the value in this information that we deliver as advisors.” Geni Whitehouse CPA

Watch on-demand Geni Whitehouse on Fathom's Expert Series

Learn more about Fathom’s Goalseek dashboard