In this episode of Advisory Conversations, we explore one of the biggest challenges facing accountants, bookkeepers, and financial coaches as they move into advisory services.

Many practitioners successfully make the transition from compliance work to advisory, only to find themselves trapped in a new problem. Every important client conversation, every strategic decision, and every piece of advice still depends on them.

At first, this feels like success. Clients value your expertise. They want your input. They trust your judgement.

But over time, it becomes exhausting.

When advisory depends on one person, growth becomes difficult. Capacity becomes limited. Holidays become stressful. The practice owner becomes the bottleneck.

We discuss why true advisory isn't about becoming the hero of every client relationship. It's about creating an advisory framework that can be delivered consistently by a team. A framework where clients trust the process, not just the person.

The conversation explores the emotional weight many advisors carry as they become deeply invested in their clients' businesses. We talk openly about the stress, responsibility, and mental load that can come from feeling accountable for every client outcome.

Most importantly, we discuss how to build a team-based advisory model that creates better experiences for clients, greater opportunities for team members, and more freedom for practice owners.

If your advisory service can't function without you, this episode will challenge you to think differently about what sustainable advisory really looks like.

Key Takeaways

• Advisory should not depend on one person if it is going to scale successfully.

• Many advisors escape the compliance trap only to fall into the advisory trap.

• Carrying the responsibility for every client decision can lead to stress, overwhelm, and burnout.

• Clients should learn to trust the advisory team, not just the practice owner.

• Building advisory capability within your team creates continuity, capacity, and resilience.

• Shared communication and collaborative client relationships strengthen trust and improve service delivery.

• The goal is not to become indispensable. The goal is to build an advisory service that delivers value whether you are in the room or not.

Resources

Advisory Teams

Mentioned in this episode:

Business Course Library

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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.

Hi, Deb.

Hi, Tim.

How are you?

Yeah, I'm pretty good.

How about you?

I'm good, thanks.

Yeah, I'm good.

So we're going to talk about a very common theme, actually today about how, you know, many accountants escape the technician trap, but then they soon find themselves trapped in advisory because clients are wholly dependent on them for the strategy, for the decision making, and for all the guidance that they're looking for.

And that means it becomes exhausting for the founder, doesn't it?

And why.

Why do you think that is?

Why does that happen, Deb?

Why is advisory so emotionally exhausting?

I think people's businesses are emotional for them, for the.

For the client.

And when they're in difficulty or they're needing help, that emotion transfers or can be easily transferred onto the person that's taking some responsibility of helping them in difficult times.

So, I mean, for myself, I've mentioned this before, but for myself, it was.

I found myself thinking about other people's businesses a lot and thinking about solutions and the consequences maybe of what happens if we don't find a solution.

They can't carry on as they're carrying on.

And a lot of the time they come to us, the business owner clients come to us, and they've exhausted all other avenues.

They've exhausted their own mental resource, if you like.

They don't know the answers, or they continue to make mistakes and they're not understanding why.

So it is emotionally draining for somebody to take on that or help somebody out of that.

And, yeah, you can quite easily become the fixer if you're not careful.

And it's not our responsibility to be a fixer.

It's our responsibility to guide them and teach them how to make their own decisions.

But that can be a challenging journey.

So, I mean, I found myself thinking of different ways that I could explain solutions easily to a client, thinking of maybe analogies that would be relatable to them.

And this is all headspace.

This is all.

I mean, it's enjoyable work, but it's all headspace.

And depending on how many clients you take on doing this, I mean, that's a lot of.

That's a lot of work.

That's a lot of mental headspace.

You really do have to.

You're going to do it in volume on your own, you have to detect yourself from the outcomes completely, which comes with practice.

But there's an easier solution.

Spread the load.

If you spread the load amongst other people within your team, it doesn't all fall on you.

It's funny, isn't it?

Because a lot of talk out there is about how you need to become the trusted advisor.

And I think that's what people take on board.

So they deliver the advisory themselves and they think, I'm going to be the one that my clients trust.

I'm going to build up this great relationship with them.

Fantastic.

Of course.

But there's only so many clients you can build up that fantastic relationship with.

So unless you're charging them an amazing amount of money each month to work with them, then it's only going to get you so far, because as we've talked about before, there's only so much time, there's only so much capacity you can hold in your brain, there's only so much capacity you can hold emotionally before you burn out, before you become unwell and before everything just completely implodes and then everything falls over because it's reliant on one person.

And.

And if that one person was to unfortunately become unwell or, I don't know, damage their knee ligaments, play a football, it's the best thing I can come up with.

Sorry, dad.

Football again, you know, and are out of action for a period of time, anything like that, you know, fall off a ladder at home, you know, suddenly you're out of action.

If everything's relying on you and you've become that, go to person for everything.

What happens to the business?

What happens to the people that work for you if they're wholly dependent on you as well.

So.

But I do understand that.

I do get it.

It's very difficult for people who have created the business themselves, have built up these relationships with their clients.

It's very difficult for them to step away and gradually release control.

And I know we don't like to think of ourselves as being in control, but actually being in control is a safe space, isn't it?

It's safe to be the one that it all revolves around, because it means, you know, that everything's gonna work the way you want it to work, but it also creates this problem where everything solely depends on you.

So it's about how you can move away from those feelings and be able to let go and put faith and trust in your team to help deliver these advisory skills to your clients.

It's.

You Know, I think I've also found, Deb, practice owners have become quite good at delegating compliance tasks and delegating meeting deadlines as well.

You know, we need, we need to use that.

We need to do this by this, this and this.

Who's taking ownership of that?

Who's doing the VAT returns, who's doing the self assessment tax returns this month, who's doing the limited company accounts, who's doing the corporation tax?

You kind of like that.

It just boom, boom, boom.

It's easy, isn't it?

You can just throw that out because you know, there's deadlines there, we've got to meet them.

This is what it needs to be done by boom.

Plus, let's do that.

Who's chasing up the clients for the missing information we're looking for?

Who's.

You know, it's very difficult then to delegate having a conversation with a client because it feels like a different dynamic completely, would you say?

Yeah, it does.

But I think it comes down to the advisor, the business owner, showing confidence in their team, particularly to the client, in front of the client, and not looking as if they're just passing over problems to somebody else or not being responsible for the outcome.

So it has to be tackled in the right way.

There may well be hesitation on the client's part until they also build trust in their team.

I remember when I first transitioned from doing the advisory with another team member, and I had complete confidence in the team member, but a couple of clients were a little bit unsure until they had the first conversation, then they were blown away.

So I think it's knowing that your clients are in safe hands, and that comes from choosing the right team member, making sure they've got the relevant systems in place, the strategies, the confidence and the experience.

And the experience comes from doing, doesn't it?

So, yeah, it is a transition, but it's definitely one that's worth doing.

I would never have been able to scale advisory services at all.

In fact, I would have probably dropped off delivering them much very soon into the journey of advisory, to be fair, like a lot of people do, because it was just all gonna land in my lap and I could see it.

And it wasn't what.

Wasn't what me, my team or my business needed.

So, yeah, just, you've gotta spread it.

You've gotta spread the load and show the confidence in your team.

Can you.

Can you remember, Deb, in the previous membership when we asked everyone to put forward case studies for all of the things they'd done with their Clients, successes they'd achieved, et cetera, in different areas and with different kind of strategies, solving different problem.

You were the one that fired all these case studies in straight away.

And I would say that probably wouldn't have happened if you were delivering advisory all alone, would it?

No, no, not at all.

No.

I had lots of case studies that were all ready to go, ready to be submitted, but I wouldn't have been able to serve all those clients on my own.

And some of the case studies, we were of times when things didn't go quite so well either.

Maybe the client didn't take on the advice that we were giving them, weren't taking on the suggestions, weren't ready to increase their prices, for instance, or just were not ready to take action.

They needed to hear, hear the advice, but let it sit for a while because sometimes it's a complete different direction they need to move in.

But that was valuable, adding all those case studies in as well, because it doesn't always go to plan and you shouldn't expect it always to go to your plan because ultimately it's somebody else's business, they have autonomy, they have the right to make their own decisions.

Yeah, I thought that was.

It's key, isn't it?

I would never have been able to serve all those clients on my own.

Never.

No, no, I, I know.

And the difficulty when you're as a.

From a client's perspective.

Let's look at it from there.

So you say you run a business and you've got your accountant and they, they do the statutory stuff for you, so the compliance.

But you do trust them, you trust the owner because you've built that relationship up with them.

It's them that you contact when you want something or when you've got a question, one of those repetitive questions, Deb, that we've talked about quite a lot, why you needed that parrot on your shoulder.

But there's the trust thing, isn't there?

So the owner of the practice, the accountant and booking in practice is kind of the personality and the figurehead of the business.

But to the client, they're the one with all the knowledge.

That's how they see it.

And it's about educating the client that actually yes, I have this knowledge, of course, and I will do my best to support you, but I also have a team that have lots of knowledge as well and they're there to support you too.

So I think that the first step to empowering your team into starting to be involved in advisory, but also the dual task of from a Client's perspective, seeing someone else in a strategy session with you, even if they're not saying much, just starting to get used to another face being on the, in on the conversation, maybe taking notes, maybe sitting back and listening and learning, it just starts to build a relationship that this person is now coming in to be involved.

This person's coming in to add insights and have some input.

And perhaps when that happens over two or three sessions, you know, the team member will start to build up some confidence to be able to speak up and start to perhaps introduce the session and perhaps close the session off and summarize and ask a couple of questions.

And over that period of time, and it does take time, they will start to take ownership of that strategy session.

And that way the client starts to see.

Actually, I quite like what they're talking about is where is the owner?

And now I've got two people serving me.

Well, then when you start to add that third person and that fourth person in over time, that's when a business owner can start to step away from the session in itself.

And that's when the client has suddenly realized he's got all these other people looking after him and he can contact them directly.

He knows what they talked about in the last strategy session.

So there's that opportunity to, to find support elsewhere rather than always having to contact the owner of the practice whose brain is probably frazzled and probably struggles to answer the question with a clear mind anyway, because they're probably thinking about something else when they've picked up the phone or looked at their emails because there's all these other things going on in the business that they need to take care of.

Yeah, yeah.

I found that when we took on new clients or started well, even with existing clients, we would have a shared communication hub in the form of a WhatsApp group where we had the bookkeeper, the accountant, the business financial coach and myself in there.

And that helped massively because I wasn't the person that they contacted directly.

All conversations went through a particular, their particular closed group.

If they needed their PA or VA or anybody in the group as well, that could happen.

And it just gave them the sense that they've got a team on hand, not just one trusted advisor.

So for their perspective, it was fantastic because it meant they always had somebody that had an answer available because it didn't matter if I was in meetings because somebod else would be able to answer their question and they had.

I think sometimes you get.

You end up being the bottleneck or the trusted advisor.

Because of all the time that the clients have invested in showing you their situation and teaching you about the way their business runs.

And when they think that they're going to be directed to somebody else, they think they have to start that all from scratch.

Because how on earth can you, this second person, know everything about their business when they've never spoken to them?

Actually, if you, if you present it as a full team picture and we work as a team, it doesn't matter that you've only, you're only speaking it once, because it's not only going to one person, it is going to your full team.

And that's the difference.

That's, that's the difference between the clients being resistant to just having you as the trusted advisor or being able to teach to talk to any member of the team, because they know that everybody, everybody has all the information, even maybe if they haven't spoken to them directly as often, if that's the right way of explaining it.

I've kind of like gone on, on a bit of a roundabout way, but yeah, that's, that was my experience.

So that's how I presented it in discovery calls to clients.

It was not just me.

It's.

You have access to a team.

Yeah, it works.

What, what was the.

So, so when you shared that with a prospect at the time and it came on board as a client, what was their, did they have a reaction to that?

Was there any.

They were blown away.

They were blown away.

They thought, fantastic, I've got a finance team.

I say we're like your, your finance department, like your accounts department.

You know, at the end of this, in, in this WhatsApp group, this is your, your finance department, like a bigger organization.

You go to the accounts office, you go to the accounts lady.

You know that in our own office, that's where we are.

It's not just one person.

And, you know, they were blown away.

They thought that was fantastic.

You know, all of a sudden it elevated their, their own business because they had a, an outsourced finance team for what they thought they were just paying for one bookkeeper, you know, one, you know, one accountant.

So, yeah, I think it dramatically increases your conversion rate, you know, of sales calls.

Who wouldn't want to pay for a team instead of just one person?

Just makes business sense.

But it makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

Because as we've mentioned previously, you know, relying on one person is.

It's an accident waiting to happen.

Because if that person is holding everything in their brain and they've not shared with Their team.

Then when that client then comes for the next strategy session, the business owner's not around, they're starting from scratch again.

And that's when the client's going to think, well, these.

They don't know the same as the business owner.

But actually they haven't been given the opportunity to know the same as the business owner because they've not got a system in place.

They've not got a shared CRM, they've not got access to all the conversations that have happened because it's just in the business owner's head.

And he or she may have made some notes, I suppose, but it's not the same.

It's not the same as having a process, having a standard operating procedure, is it?

You know, and a system in place that they can follow.

No, no, it's not the same.

Not the same at all.

Yeah.

So, okay, so what can we do?

How can we help people, Deb?

What can people do if they need a bit of help with this and they need to.

Or they just need to learn more about being the bottleneck in their advisory business?

First, Port of Call is come join us in our free Facebook group where we talk more about advisory teams.

There's free resources, there's more opportunity to learn about what we do.

That's.

That's kind of our central hub, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

And they can find that on Facebook.

Just search advisory teams and you'll see a nice graphic and you'll see.

You'll see us and we'll be there ready to let you in once you've answered a couple of simple questions.

Questions.

And you can come and see, you know, all of the.

All of the education that we pop into the Facebook group constantly.

You get opportunities to see the shorts from our podcast episodes before they're released.

So you get everything earlier than what goes out on social media.

You get access to our free training sessions quickly.

You get access to the replays quickly, faster than anybody else.

And you get access to us.

And we're always willing to share our knowledge.

So the first step is, of course, come and join the Facebook group.

We have written a book called Advisory Teams.

You can get that from Amazon, but you can also get a free download of that when you join the.

Join the group.

And there are some other tools that are available for you once you're in there, too, all aimed to let you see where you're at and let you learn how you can move forward and what you need to focus on next.

So come along and join us in the Facebook group, just search advisory teams and come and join.

But for now, thank you very much for joining us again.

Thanks, Deb.

As always, a pleasure to have our advisory conversations.

Yeah, likewise.

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,.

Sam.