SPECIAL EPISODE 🎙️

What actually happens inside an APX LIVE Implementation Cohort — and what will you have built by the end of the 10 weeks?

In this special Q&A episode, guest host Lynn Graham puts the questions to APX founders Tim Seymour and Deb Halliday ahead of the final LIVE Implementation Cohort of 2026, starting on Tuesday 29th September at 12.30pm.

We talk about why we created APX in the first place, the bottleneck we kept seeing as practice owners moved into advisory, and why learning how to deliver advisory is only part of the answer.

Because at some point, advisory has to move beyond the owner.

That's where the LIVE Implementation Cohort comes in.

Lynn asks us about what happens during the 10 weeks, what we expect from those taking part and, importantly, what you'll actually implement along the way.

This isn't just another training course.

Each week we'll work together to turn what you're learning into practical processes you can use in your practice. You'll build your own SOPs, take them back to your team, start implementing them and come back the following week with accountability from us to keep things moving.

We also talk about the wider APX Mentorship that sits around the cohort — including the self-paced learning, ongoing support, Polly our AI Coach, our Business Course Library, community and WhatsApp support, and the Financial Strategies that continue the journey beyond the initial 10 weeks.

The aim?

For you to finish the cohort having done far more than simply learn about Advisory Teams.

You'll have started building one.

You'll have the processes, SOPs and foundations in place to continue developing your team and move into 2027 ready to make Advisory Teams a real focus within your practice.

Our final LIVE Implementation Cohort of 2026 starts:

📅 Tuesday 29th September 2026

⏰ 12.30pm UK time

If you've been thinking about moving advisory beyond yourself and developing your team to deliver it with you, this episode will give you a really good look at what we'll be doing together.

Find out more and sign up at apxtraining.co.uk

Welcome to Advisory Conversations with Tim Seymour and Deb Halliday.

This podcast is for accounting professionals and financial coaches who are ready to step beyond compliance and into advisory.

Because real advisory isn't about doing more yourself.

It's about building something that works without you being the bottleneck.

Good morning, Tim and Deb, it's lovely to see you again.

Good morning.

So I just wanted to ask you a few questions.

If I'm talking to other accountants and bookkeepers over here in Ireland and I want to point them in the direction of APX training, can you give me a quick overview of apx, why you created it, and how the mentorship came about?

Yeah, sure.

Do you want me to go first, Deb?

I think so.

Okay.

Well, we, we spotted a common problem from working with accounting and bookkeeping practice owners and guiding them into delivering advisory.

There seemed to be a barrier, you know, so people would learn to deliver the advisory strategies and they would start to get success with clients, but they would then come to a standstill.

And initially I didn't quite understand why things were coming to a standstill.

And then in time it became quite clear it's because they just didn't have capacity or time to keep delivering the advisory themselves.

So me and Deb, you know, found ourselves with some free time in April and we sort of put our heads together and Deb had recognized the same problem.

And in fact, in her business, she built herself an advisory team.

So she had already solved the problem in her own account in booking a practice.

And so we, we put our brains together and we, we, we wrote a book, Advisory Teams, which we were very excitedly writing and coming up with more ideas and, and everything as we, as we wrote.

And yeah, that, that went out, so that's available for people to read.

And then from the book, we created the framework, which is technically the elearning platform.

And now of course, the live implementation cohort and the workshops that we're going to be running are going to follow those and they're starting very soon on Tuesday 29th September.

So we're very, we're very excited about that.

But yeah, basically to, to summarize your question, we spotted a problem and we've provided the solution.

And so accounting and bookkeeping practice owners, globally, all over the world, we can work with that.

Want to deliver advisory or want to scale advisory.

We can help them build a team and we can help them initially deliver advisory, but then afterwards that, we can help them build the team.

That's brilliant.

So what exactly is the live cohort the implementation cohort.

Yeah, I'll answer that one.

We'll take it in terms, shall we, Jim?

Yeah, let's do that.

The live implementation cohort is where we transition from just learning to actually taking action and implementing what you've learned into your business.

So it follows the same as the E Learning program, but we take on a small cohort three times a year, the first one being in September, like Tim just said, on the 29th and a Tuesday.

And we run it for 10 weeks.

And each week you'll implement one of the modules from the program, from the mentorship.

But you create an SOP standard operating procedure and then you take that to your team and present it and implement it with your team each week.

So we then hold you accountable as well.

So you're implementing as you go.

And we think that that's.

Well, we found that that's the best way to ensure that people start actually attaining and reaching their goals.

And if they've joined our mentorship, then their goal is going to be to become from a technician to an advisor and then to build an advisory team.

So, yeah, so it covers the technician to advisory stage and then the leadership stage stage, which includes spotting the talent and training and building high performing advisory teams.

That's implementation cohort.

And so is that why it's.

You've called it implementation rather than just training?

It's the, it's the piece that they have to do between each session.

Yeah, it's about taking actions.

What we didn't want were people to come along, watch us, listen to us go away, say that was jolly good, not take any action, come back next week and repeat and do the same.

We've seen that and we don't want that.

You know, we want people to take action.

So by taking them through the actions they need to take, giving them just the one action each week allows them the time to go and implement.

And like dad said, you know, they're going to walk away with a standing operating procedure from each session.

They're going to take action by having a meeting about that with their team and implementing that into their business.

And then they come back the following week and we say, how did you get on?

You know, what have you, have you achieved it?

If you haven't, why haven't you?

What's holding you back?

What can we do to make sure you take that action before we move forward?

So it's kind of that accountability.

But yeah, basically it's all about learning, building and implementing rather than just learning for the sake of learning.

And not really moving, moving forward.

I think that's fantastic because I like, I would certainly be somebody that has shiny object syndrome and I pay for a course and I won't actually do it or I'll go along, I'll sit and I'll take notes and that's the last you'll ever see of those notes.

So I think that's brilliant.

So what will people actually have at the end of the, you know, what would they build during the 10 weeks?

They will build a whole library of SOPs.

So they will come away with the processes and policies for each stage of building an advisory team.

So they will end up with a suite of services and the skill set to be able to build a high performing team of.

When I say team, it could be just one, it could be, you know that you want to have a team in the future, it could be two or three, but you could have a lot more.

You could have eight or more team members.

It really is the skill set that you need and policies and processes so you can actually start implementing those into your business.

Brilliant.

And how does, how does that help move advisory beyond the business owner?

That's kind of the part of what we do at APX training.

You know, we recognize that the business owner or the practice owner is often the bottleneck for the business.

Starts off being the bottleneck for the world of compliance.

Then, you know, they find a way to take on technical staff, accountants, bookkeepers and tax, you know, the admin staff as well and they create a whole team that delivers all of the statutory requirements for clients.

And that seems to be quite easy for practice owners to do.

Then they start to see, oh, advisory, we need to do that now.

So we're going to start delivering advisory to our clients.

We're going to help our clients achieve their outcomes.

This is fantastic.

I'm having a great time as a business owner doing this and then suddenly you can't do any more because you're just completely brains frazzled.

Everything's coming back to you.

The clients are asking for you, the team's asking for you.

And then you suddenly, you might not realize it, but you actually created your own bottleneck for delivering advisories.

So that's what we are trying to help practice owners do so that we can create their team to deliver advisory which then enables the owner to choose what they want to do.

That might be that they want to continue being involved in the advisory.

They might want to be in the, in the weekly meetings with their team.

It might be that they want to go off and sell their yacht around the Pacific Ocean.

Who knows?

Who knows?

And, you know, anything's there.

It might be that they build their team up to such a level that they're able to sell the practice to their team a little bit like Deb did, as we know.

But, yeah, this is, you know, what we're creating in these live implementation cohorts is one aspect of making this happen.

There's so much more to the mentorship that our members get, but the live implementation cohorts are where the action really happens and where we hold that accountability to take action and to start moving yourself out of that bottleneck because it's an uncomfortable place.

And sometimes it comes from being successful.

Actually, it's a funny kind of dynamic because it feels good that your clients want you.

It feels good that your team looks up to you and want to work for you and want to kind of serve you in that way.

But actually, it can be a diff.

It can be very, very stressful, and we want to remove that stress for people.

You know, we want practice owners to be successful.

We want their practices to be able to achieve what they want it to achieve, and we want the team to be able to develop.

Because with AI coming in, you know, how much, how many technical staff are you going to need in the future is that going to reduce?

And if so, what a great opportunity to.

For the team to step into advisory and to start helping clients achieve their outcomes.

So, yeah, sorry, I might have gone off on a tangent there, but that's.

Yeah, not at all.

Not at all.

As usual, it's a loud.

That's where it's usually me.

What should someone have achieved by the end of the cohort?

So, like, if I was to join, what should I achieve by the end of it?

So the confidence to be able to take what you've learned and what you've started to implement and to start delivering advisory.

That's, in a nutshell, what we want you to be taking away at the end.

And is the live implementation cohort, the whole APX mentorship?

No, no, that's just a small part of what we offer.

You know, all mentees have access to the E learning platform, which takes them through all of the same.

All of the same education and all the same steps.

So you get to go through the elearning platform, then you get to come to the live implementation workshops.

So that takes care of that and that takes care of the implementation and the training.

But there's also the business course library, which they get access to and they're able to use that as a form of education to their clients.

So their clients can access the business course library and answer questions that they would generally be ringing up the owner and asking constantly.

And we talk about.

Deb talks about the power on her shoulder from, from answering the same questions in such a repetitive nature to all of these various different clients over the years.

The business course library solves that problem as well.

So you can, if you're an APX member, you can provide that access to your clients.

So instead of them constantly ringing up asking the same questions, they can look at the pool of resources within the library, they can search the question and they can get an answer for it.

So, so they get access to the business course library.

There's also a massive library of all the various different advisory skills, so they will be able to access that.

There's advisory support packs and there's also Polly.

So Polly is our AI parrot.

So Polly has all of mine and Deb's knowledge in her, in her brain.

And our members can, when they're, when they're working through things, when they've got a question and maybe it's, it's not the right time of day to ask us, for whatever reason, they can go on to Polly, ask Polly the question and she will respond as if it's us.

And so that's a fantastic attribute to, to what they get.

We've also got a WhatsApp community, so of course, if they can't get an answer from Polly or if it's in normal hours, they might ask us through the WhatsApp group.

That's absolutely fine as well.

And then also there's the financial strategies.

So teaching people, you know, the way to deliver advisory how to look for insights, how to look for patterns is one thing.

Bringing a team into that to learn that is another thing.

Having set strategies that they can then implement into their business so that their team can pick a strategy and start to implement that with certain clients that need those strategies, I think takes it to the next level.

And we've got a.

We're going to be delivering those on a monthly basis as well, that starts in February.

And really looking forward to that one because there's even more implementation happening and that'll be delivered through live implementation cohorts as well, once a month.

So, yeah, there's a lot as you can, as you can grasp, and it can be a little bit overwhelming perhaps as well, because there's a lot of information there, but that's what they get.

Yeah.

And what happens members Sorry, go ahead.

I was going to say Hetty Verney has partnershiped with us.

How could I not mention Hetty?

Yes.

What does Heti do?

So Hetty is.

She's been running her accountancy practice for 30 years, I think.

Is it Tim?

And she is also certified and experienced in belief coding.

So she takes your limiting beliefs and your underlying subconscious defaults, if you like, to enable you to change identity.

So from being an accountant or a bookkeeper to actually becoming an advisor, because you can learn how to become an advisor, but Hetty helps you and assists you to become that aligned with becoming an advisor.

So you can find out more about Hetty and what she does on one of our podcasts.

In fact, she's on two of our podcasts.

So look for wow for that episode and she'll explain it far better than I could.

I think that's amazing because it is hard to go from technician doing the work to then advisory.

And it is a bit like a identity shift.

So I think that's huge.

That's a real benefit to the cohort.

Is it my turn or is it your turn?

It's your turn, Dan.

I've done a lot of talking.

So that's when we'll start.

The September cohort is the first cohort of the Implementation foundation, which is technician to adviser, and then the leadership.

And then that cohort will go into February because obviously we've got December and January, which is tax return season, so we're not going to start anything new in tax return season.

So we'll wait till February, but that's when we start the financial strategies.

And as Tim has mentioned, we do one a month where the E learning is dropped the first week, and then the second week of the month they can join the live implementation workshop.

And then the third week is when they choose a client or implement it in their own business to get an experience of that strategy.

And then when they have implemented it with a client, they upload a case study and they gain a certification for that particular strategy.

And then we do another one in March, and we're doing 12 of them for 12 months.

Wow.

That's brilliant.

That is brilliant.

So why.

Why join this cohort rather than wait until the new year?

Well, when's the best time to start taking action?

You know, for me, it's now.

Yeah.

The thing is, if you join now, come the beginning of December, you would have implemented 10 standing operating procedures into your business.

And how.

And the procedures of how to Deliver advisory with your team.

That's, that's the bottom line.

And also, of course, then you would have gone through all of that training, made the implementations and you'll be ready to start then implementing the financial strategies that we start in February.

So it kind of just puts you in the right place to have everything set up, everything in place to really go forward in February onwards.

And the financial strategies that we offer are all strategies that lots of clients will be looking for.

They might not know it, but they, they, they solve the problems that clients have on a regular basis and you'll have a pool of clients that will need help with these certain strategies.

So it's all designed to help build the advisory offer to your clients, but also not just the offer to actually deliver the advisory to them in a certain way that delivers results.

So, yeah, why, why would you, why would anybody wait?

Is also because this is the first cohort, you know, we've set the price as, as the prices, and that price will be grandfathered in forevermore.

So this is like the introductory price.

This is what it is.

You'll be ready to go.

You already would have everything in place to move forward.

So, yeah, why wait?

That's brilliant.

Yeah.

So if somebody's watching this and they go, yeah, I really need that.

What do they do now?

Where do they go?

What do they do?

They can go to apxtraining.co.uk and they can have a look at what's included and there's easy sign up there.

They can come to Croissants and Coffee, which we hold on a Tuesday morning, and ask questions, join in the conversation.

And we only have one left, don't we, before the actual live implementation cohort.

So that's on the morning of the 29th of September.

We run them every week, year round.

But yeah, come and ask questions or go to our website or both.

And is there a link to Croissants and coffee on your website?

Yes.

Yep, perfect.

Okay.

Yes, there is.

Thank you very much.

Lovely to chat to you both.

Thanks, Lynne.

Really appreciate you joining us today to ask us these questions.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, Lyn.

Thanks for listening to advisory conversations with Tim Seymour and Deb Halliday.

If you found this useful, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss the next episode.

We'll see you next time.