In this episode of Advisory Conversations, we're tackling one of the biggest challenges facing accounting professionals making the move into advisory services: hitting a growth ceiling.

For many firms, advisory starts well. Clients value the conversations, fees increase, and the work becomes far more rewarding than traditional compliance services. But over time, a common problem appears. Every important client conversation, every strategic recommendation, and every advisory meeting still depends on the practice owner.

At that point, growth slows down.

We explore why this happens, how many practitioners unintentionally become the bottleneck in their own businesses, and what needs to change if advisory is going to scale successfully.

Throughout the conversation, we share real experiences from our own journeys and from working with firms that have made the transition. We discuss the importance of building systems, developing confidence within your team, and creating an advisory framework that allows expertise to be delivered consistently, without everything relying on one person.

If you want to build an advisory practice that can grow beyond your personal capacity, this episode is for you.

Key Takeaways

• Advisory is not simply compliance with a few extra conversations added on.

• Many firms reach an advisory ceiling because every client relationship depends on the practice owner.

• Recognising that you are the bottleneck is often the first breakthrough.

• Sustainable advisory services require systems, frameworks, and team development.

• Building an advisory team creates capacity, consistency, and long-term growth.

• The goal is not to become a better bottleneck. The goal is to remove the bottleneck altogether.

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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.

Welcome along.

Hello, Deb, how are you today?

I'm great, thanks, Tim.

How are you?

Yeah, pretty good, thanks.

Pretty good.

We are going to be talking today about why advisory firms hit a ceiling.

And Deb, I know we were talking about this before.

I want to take you back to when you were running your accounting and bookkeeping business.

And I want to ask you what first made you realize that advisory could become a bottleneck.

I could see it coming.

And it was one particular conversation I started having with a new client that I'd taken on.

And we were discussing his business and I realized we were, we were implementing certain systems for him and his business was in difficulty.

He was, he was running.

He'd run up £30,000 worth on a credit card just for his wages bill in the last few weeks and he was in low season.

And I could.

When we started talking about his business, I realized actually this, this business can need a lot of support.

And I knew that we had the answers to be able to help him and to fix some systems and processes and pricing that kind of stuff with him.

But it was going to be a big job and he desperately needed our help and we wanted to help him that I realized as I started having lots of meetings with him, I didn't have any time to prepare.

So we would.

The more I had meetings with him, the more we uncovered that needed resolving.

And it was at that point that I realized that I needed to reach out to somebody else and ask them to collaborate so that I could start passing these types of clients on.

Because I found that I was in danger of being roped into fixing his business when actually I was meant to be growing my own.

And time is a finite resource, isn't it?

So even though he was paying us a lot of money, I was still exchanging time for that money and it was time that I wasn't spending on other aspects of my own business that I needed to be.

I need to be concentrating on.

So.

So it was at that point I thought I was starting to be reluctant to have more meetings with him because it was just more and more and more that was.

That was piling on.

So I reached out and we got him sorted and I had somebody else to dedicate all their time to helping them.

So so, yeah, so that was.

That was.

It's funny, isn't it?

You remember certain conversations or certain instances, but that was mine realizing that, actually it takes a lot more than just your meeting, you know, it takes a lot of headspace.

Yeah, of course.

And while listening to you, I've actually reflected back to when I ran my accounting practice and transitioned into advisory.

And I can remember being at that kind of crossroads of what do I do now?

Because I really enjoying this work.

This work really, you know, it gets me going.

You know, I'm really enjoying it.

I really want to do more of this.

And I don't really want to do the compliance anymore because I'm not enjoying that.

And I can remember having these thoughts going round in my head, kind of whirring around for a period of time.

You know, shall I reach out to someone who used to work for me, ask her if she wants to come back and take over the compliance side, the technical side of the business completely, and then I can be free and focus on advisory.

And that.

That was kind of the thoughts that were going around in my head at that moment in time, because I knew I was approaching that point where I just didn't have the time to keep, you know, growing the advisory side of the business.

And I was fortunate because somebody did approach me out of the blue and offered to buy the compliance side.

So it was a natural thing for me to be able to say, you know what?

Yeah, that's actually a solution to the problem I've got here.

I can sell the compliance side off, not worry about that element, and I can work with clients on just the advisory side.

So that worked for me.

It doesn't mean that's the answer to every practice owner who sat listening to this, because my advice would actually be probably not to do that and actually would be, do you know what?

If you've got a team, use your team, because that's the opportunity that you've got as a practice owner, that you've got all this knowledge around you that you can.

You can develop, and they're going to enjoy it more than crunching numbers.

It's interesting, isn't it, when we.

When we both look back and I hadn't really thought about it until you started talking, so it is interesting how it invokes different thoughts in our mind.

What we have seen, especially over the last four years, Deb, is that many, many practice owners kind of miss this problem, don't they?

Don't really realize they are the bottleneck.

Have you experienced that?

Yeah, yeah.

I think advisory is sold to us as the solution to the compliance hamster wheel, isn't it?

But it's still time for money.

It might be a lot more money, it might be that you can serve less clients, but it's still time delivering.

And for a business owner, they meant to be running their business, they've generally, we found that they've got a team, they've taken on bookkeeper, accountant, etc or more than one that are delivering the compliance.

So they've swapped their bookkeeping, if you like, for running their business and then they introduce advisory.

But they've swapped running their business for advisory.

They're back to delivering, although it be for higher value, but it's still delivery and they should be running their business.

We found that all the time and I found, we found that it, it stalls people, doesn't it?

Yeah, I mean they know advisory sounds really desirable and as you say, it's great work.

I mean, I much prefer, given the choice, yes, advisory all the time over bookkeeping, but it shouldn't come at the expense of running your business.

And we were finding that a lot of, with, with other colleagues and people in our, in our previous membership.

But it, it just slows everything down, doesn't it?

You know, if it's all around you as in, as the business owner, if everything has to flow through you, then you are a bottleneck and that's, that's the simple fact of the matter.

And there's nothing that is going to happen with the business unless you can remove yourself from being that bottleneck.

And you know, I've seen in the membership that I ran previously, I've seen so many people learn the skills to deliver a really high value advisory offer.

But also I've seen, and some go ahead and do it, but they don't necessarily do it to everyone.

They pick and choose their best clients to do it to, which was on the advice that I used to give.

But then they get to a point where it just slows and then, and then you can, you can sense this resistance from people because they're a bit, it's down to me, you know, it's, it's all on me.

And even if they don't say it, we know that that is the reason, the hidden reason behind it all.

And, and I think that's why, you know, as a business owner we don't notice this because we're the one in the middle of it.

And because you're in the middle of it, you don't see the, what's the saying?

You don't see the wood for the dust because you're doing, you're doing, doing, doing.

You're turing in, you're doing, you're cheering in, you're doing.

Even if you're, Even if you're passing tasks over to people from the compliance aspect from your team, because you're the one passing those tasks over, you're still involved.

You're still, you know, and you're answering your team's questions when they come back to you about certain, you know, certain things, technical aspects, of course.

And so you don't really lift your head up above it all as a business owner should do or even step away from it all, as you should do to have a kind of more objective angle to look at it from.

And I don't think owners realize that they actually are in a bottleneck right now.

So, you know, anyone listening to this, if you do run your own accounting and book your own practice, is really good idea to just walk away from the business for a few hours and just take a real good look at what you're doing.

You know, what you would.

Are you doing the doing or are you actually leading the company and being the business owner?

And I think that's a really good first step into recognizing the situation you're in.

It's like anything, isn't it?

It's like, I don't know, this is probably a really bad analogy, but it's like an alcoholic admitting to themselves that they're an alcoholic, isn't it?

You know?

Do you know what I mean?

It's not.

Not a good analogy, really, is it?

But it's the only one that came into my brain.

But you in that position, you're, you know, you're drinking every day, obviously, and then at some point you realize that actually this can't go on.

I need to go and get some help to solve this problem.

And then you go and take action.

But it's, it's almost a similar thing because you're in it so much, you just can't see outside.

So I think, yeah, I think there's a.

There's a good reason why, why we miss these things.

But there are some warning signs, I guess, to knowing that you are in a bottleneck.

Did you, did you find that debate with your own business or from what you've seen from the membership before?

Yeah, after taking on a couple of advisory clients, I then, because it was all, initially, it was all sitting in my lap, I was reluctant to offer it again to other.

And I just didn't I found the hesitation in new discovery calls or talking to existing clients.

Just found I didn't mention or I didn't push the conversation towards maybe more support because I knew it would land in my lap.

I knew I didn't have any further capacity and I was barely coping with the ones that I got.

And it was my first dad started to think I need to spread this out, I need to spread the load so that we can start offering more people.

But you just stall.

It's like anything, when you get to capacity, you close your doors, don't you?

So, yeah, that's when I realized I was reaching capacity.

And they were the warning signs.

Also.

It was took a lot of my headspace, you know, I was thinking about solutions to other people's businesses a lot.

Because it's a puzzle.

If you're not careful, you can quite easily step into fixer.

You know, somebody's asked for your help, so you're tasked with coming up with solutions.

So I was, yeah, a lot of my headspace was on other people's businesses rather than my own.

And that was the warning sign for me that this needs to be spread, this needs to be systemized and spread across other team members there.

Yeah.

And I think, well, we know that that is the solution to this is to build a high performing advisory team.

But it's obviously you have to start somewhere.

And what we found from our experience is that practice owners are very good at removing themselves as a bottleneck for compliance.

So it's kind of like easy to hire a team, easy to hire new team members with the technical capabilities to deliver the bookkeeping, to deliver the accounts, to deal with the tax, you know, all the different aspects of, you know, the accountancy world that we're all so okay with and everybody understands and we start talking about that and everyone feels comfortable.

Everyone feels comfortable because it's what we know, it's what we learned through our studies, it's what we've learned through our experience.

So building a team around compliance feels comfortable.

It's quite straightforward.

We kind of know what we're looking for people to be able to do.

We know the bit that's missing within our business that we need to fill.

And so that becomes easy.

And therefore scaling compliance doesn't feel like a difficult task.

In fact, it's almost quite natural because when you build your business, you start off with compliance and that's what you build around.

So it becomes a natural progression and it feels comfortable.

But as we've talked about so many times, AI and automation you know, do we need so many team members?

Do we want to let people go because it can be done through systems, or do we want to actually look after our teams?

Which I would say most people I've ever spoken to always want to put the people who work for them first.

And that was a common theme with practice owners over the last few years that I've heard back.

So the solution to that is to now start to think about how you can scale advisory.

Because scaling advisory looks completely different to scaling compliance, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does.

I mean, with scaling compliance, there's certain amount of.

There's certain types of tasks that fall into certain categories that are then delivered by people with those qualifications.

So bookkeeping is covered by a bookkeeper, VAT returns.

If somebody's got experience and has done the qualification in tax and vat, then they can do those.

You've got the accountants that do the end of year.

So it's quite easy to look at the tasks that you've got and then know the type of team member you need based on the qualifications that cover those tasks.

And advisory is different because there aren't any qualifications for delivering advisory.

So it's.

And the other thing as well you mentioned, you can actually tell, really, with compliance if something is incorrect.

We've all got the same knowledge, we've all got the same qualification experience, and we can check the double entry, we can check a VAT return, we can check these compliance tasks and we can spot errors.

You can't do that with advisory.

There's difference of maybe how you would translate data, suggestions that you may give the insights that you pick out.

So it's quite difficult for you to scale advisory without having set systems in place.

If you've got set systems in place and strategies that if this pattern occurs and shows this insight, this is the suggestion for this particular industry or this type of business, then it's much easier to scale that and have a consistent level of service and advice.

Which is why, again, why people sit in the bottleneck.

Because they haven't put their knowledge into a system that can be then delivered by somebody else.

It's all in their head and they're worried that somebody else will do advisory differently or maybe miss opportunities or miss critical insights.

But it needs to be systemized.

It needs to be systemized into certain strategies for certain patterns.

Exactly.

Like compliance.

So, yeah, so that's.

Does that answer your question?

Always.

You always answer my questions.

Dan.

I was just gonna add, you know, when we think about what it looks like, if You've got a team delivering advisory.

And I was thinking of the calculator we shared the other day on one of our free training sessions where we showed a calculator where, say you're charging a client 500 pounds, for instance, per month for strategy sessions, you know, which is advisory, as we know, and you're following your frameworks and systems to do that.

But you're the only one delivering because you're the owner, you're the founder, so you're.

You.

You've created your bottleneck because you're the only one delivering.

So you're earning £500amonth from this one client.

So say you're doing that with 10 clients, because that's all you can.

That's all you can do and you've hit your ceiling.

But if you've got a team in the background and say you've got five members of that team who can deliver that advisory, if you can deliver to 10, they can each deliver to 10.

So that multiplies it straight away.

So now you've got five people delivering to 10 clients, so that's now 50 clients.

So you can see the maths is just developing and developing and you can see the.

That, that's the scalability, that's.

That's how you're going to scale advisory is by filtering it down so your team deliver, you know, and that if five people are delivering at 500 pounds a month, you know, 10 clients each, at 50 clients, you don't need to deliver at all, then you could remove yourself from all of the delivery, which means then you've still got all of that additional sales income coming in that you can use, you know, in the business for your team, for yourself, for the areas you need to strategically use that money for.

So you can see straight away what an opportunity there is for accountants and bookkeepers to be able to deliver this advisory.

So, yeah, I think if you are in that moment where you're listening to this and some of these problems are resonating with you and you feel that you have perhaps reached capacity yourself, then perhaps it's time to actually realize that you're your bottleneck and we want to remove you from being that bottleneck.

We're here to help and we can do that.

The first step to getting help from us is to join our free community in our.

In our Facebook group.

It's called advisory teams.

So you just need to hop onto Facebook, search advisory teams, and you'll see, you'll see myself and Deb, you'll see a picture of us and that you can, you can ask to join and you know, we'll let you in, you answer a couple of questions and then you come.

We'd love to welcome you in there because we, we know we're talking about this before as well, weren't we Deb?

You know, we, we've made in our own individual accounting and bookkeeping practices.

You know, both had 17 years, funny enough experience in, in our own practices.

And I know personally I made so many mistakes at the beginning.

You know, I didn't think like a business owner, I just saw like a technical accountant.

I thought just deliver compliance, deliver compliance, deliver.

And I made so many mistakes and I learned through years of struggling, I learned how to overcome those mistakes.

Then I was able to start delivering advisory and it just went so well.

I could just see the difference straight away.

But it's like, it's like that lightning bolt, isn't it?

Suddenly you see the light and you can see a different way of doing things.

Then I sold the compliance, which again, I'm not suggesting everybody does by the way, because I think actually delivering compliance gives you a great opportunity to deliver advisory, if I'm honest with you.

But it's what I did then I ran the membership for four years where I worked with, you know, loads of accounting and bookkeeping practice owners and I was able to share my knowledge and experience with them so that they didn't make the same mistakes that I'd made so they can get from A to B faster, which is what we want.

So within our Facebook group, you know, we share lots of value and lots of information.

And the idea, the objective for us is to help you as practice owners, you know, not be that bottleneck, get to build that advisory team in as fast a way as possible so that you can then start to enjoy your life, be free from your business and have a self sustaining practice where you are looking after your team, you know, and they've got a long term career.

Because right now, AI, whether we want to hear it or not, is going to take over a lot of the compliance tasks.

And so your team are in danger.

I would suggest so.

Look, you really want to look after your team, build an advisory team because that's the way forward, that's the future of the industry right now.

And I'm sure that will change in the future.

But right now for me, I think that's the future.

So Deb, anything else you want to add to that?

Yeah, no, I agree completely.

And I think the future of advisory is not necessarily an added bolt on.

I think it's going to be delivered at ground level.

So.

So that's why it's vital for your team to start stepping into advisory and learn.

Gain the confidence from the experience of doing and learn the strategies to be able to deliver it and spot the patterns, you know, deliver insights and suggestions.

But it will be at ground level.

It'll be part of the service, which means it's great because even though AI will drive the compliance fees down, advisory will drive them back up again.

So.

So, yeah, so I think.

I think that's definitely the way it's going.

And money is emotional.

You know, money decisions are made through emotion.

And you can't replicate emotional intelligence, you can't replicate empathy.

You know, you can't replicate that human touch.

And having a team of five, I'm using five in this example, by the way.

It could be a team of three, it could be a team of eight.

But having a team of five people looking after a client is so powerful and it takes the onus off of the owner and allows the owner to not have to be in the business all the time.

So, yeah, thanks for joining us once again, as always, Deb, thanks for answering my questions and great to end another episode with you.

Yeah, you too, Tim.

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

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

We'll see you next time.

Sake Banana chicken.

Banana.

Banana.

Banana chicken.