What happens to your clients, your team and your business when you’re not there?

In this episode of Advisory Conversations, Tim and Deb share their real-life experiences of building teams capable of delivering advisory without the practice owner at the centre of everything.

From taking a planned month away from the business to dealing with an unexpected personal crisis, Deb explains how having the right people, systems and processes in place meant her clients continued to be supported without everything falling back on her.

They also explore why developing an advisory team is about more than freeing up your time. It’s about building resilience, empowering your people and ensuring your clients can continue moving forward — even when life doesn’t go to plan.

If you’re still the person everyone relies on, this conversation might give you something to think about.

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 to another episode of Advisory Conversations.

Hello to you, Deb.

Hiya, Tim.

How you doing?

I'm all right, thanks.

I'm all right.

Thought it'd be good today for us to talk about our experience of running our own teams and hence why we are the people to deliver what we deliver to our team, our mentees in our mentorship, which is all about creating advisory teams, removing the practice owner as the.

The bottleneck, which also includes a lot of leadership skills and a lot of.

A lot of emotional intelligence that goes behind all of that, that goes on.

So whilst I'm kind of waffling on, let's just get straight into it.

So, yeah, so, Deb, you know, I believe quite strongly that you're one of the first people that is certainly that I know in, in.

In all of the accounting and bookkeeping practices I know in the UK that have actually created their own advisory team initially.

You know, we're the first people to do this.

So bit of a trailblazer, I would say, for this.

And, you know, it enabled you to take time out of the business at times, which is something that practice owners desperately want to get to, but find hard to because they're dragged back in to answer questions from clients, to answer questions from their team.

So tell us a bit about, you know, how you were able to take a month out, for instance, and you went to Canada with your dad, didn't you, for an important holiday?

Yeah, well, it started when I realized that I'd swapped bookkeeping for advisory.

I built a team of bookkeepers, accountants, because I didn't want to have to do the delivery as well as the marketing, sales and all onboarding.

Didn't want to be capped, both with my time and my.

My income.

So it's.

I was starting to take on advisory clients and realized actually this is taking up my time.

I'm now responsible for delivering and having client meetings where I'd given that over to the bookkeeping team.

So I reached out to another business financial coach and she started taking on the clients that had come to depend on me.

And it worked really, really well.

They loved her.

But I realized she was quickly going to get capacity.

So there was other things I wanted to do within the business.

Build systems, processes, make sure that on Those plateaus of business that everything was running smoothly, tighten up the wheels, you know, the nuts and bolts, that type of thing.

Make sure that we're.

We're at the standard to get to the next level.

And I also wanted to take time out.

I wanted to have an income, whereas it wasn't based on if I wasn't working, I wasn't earning.

It was.

I mean, whoever wants to do that is just time for money constantly.

So I.

My dad had expressed a wish to go to Canada.

He had two brothers.

One had passed and.

But still had a large family in the west side of Canada, Vancouver island and up in Whitehorse in the Yukon.

And he had a younger brother that had.

That was still alive and had his.

Had his family in the Toronto area.

So.

Okay, dad.

Dad's 84.

This.

Well, he was 83 when we started planning it.

And this is going to be a bit of an epic trip.

It's not going to be like a week's holiday, is it?

This is going to be a month particularly, so we can't have him going from one place to another and we have to have rest days and, you know, he has to recover from the flight and get to see everything and all the people that he wants to see in the time that we were spending there.

And it was great.

I basically left the business in very capable hands and I wasn't on call, I wasn't reached out to once.

It was all smooth, you know, every now and again I would check the messages, nothing.

And I just thought, this is great.

I can be away enjoying myself, knowing that everything's going on swimmingly.

So, yeah, so that was all planned for and it was.

The processes were in place, the team were in place and that was planned for.

But a little bit later, within the.

Within the year, it was really tested because it was completely unplanned.

My mum went into hospital on New Year's Eve, just right at the beginning of tax season, as everybody knows.

New Year's Eve, she went into hospital.

She'd been in a care home anyway, but she went into hospital and my dad, I had to drive my dad, which she was 60 miles away from us, so I had to drive my dad every day to visit her in hospital for a month.

She sadly passed away at the end of January, but then we couldn't have the funeral to the end of February, so I didn't feel right going back to work front of house or Being, you know, visible with people while that was happening, having to organise everything to do with that.

So I ended up having two months off from the business.

But it, I mean, I did work in the background, but I wrote a book, I was developing online training programs, I was doing what I wanted to do while the business was running.

But that was completely unplanned.

But the systems that we had in place before propped up the business when I, I couldn't be there, you know, as in impromptu.

Yeah, it was just drop everything.

Right, I'm off.

So, yeah, but.

And that includes advisory, because we've built the team.

The team were delivering the advisory from entry level to advanced business coaching.

So, yeah, so, yeah, I did build a team, but it's probably for selfish reasons.

Most business owners at some point don't want to actually do the delivery of their own business.

Today.

I think it should be that.

Something that we should all be aspiring to, whatever business we're in, that we should be the ones overseeing potentially, or.

And if you can remove yourself from even overseeing, even better.

And you know, I think there's a couple of things in what you said.

The, the trip to Canada was planned.

So that kind of feels like that's a lot more possible for many people.

Like if they think, well, I can plan to go away because I can, I could kind of tell my clients I'm not around that month, they can wait to follow my blah, blah, blah, I can kind of get over that.

I know that's not what you did, but I'm looking at it from practice owner's perspective right now.

So they can probably think, yeah, I could probably plan to be away.

It's a long time and I'm probably still going to check my phone and check my emails and get dragged back into things, but at least I'm away.

But then when you've got something that happens out of your control and obviously, you know, very sad to hear the reasons why with the amount of debt.

But.

But to suddenly not be able to work or not feel able to work for a couple of months is a completely different scenario because it's unplanned.

And I think that was the key thing you said that was not planned for at all yet.

It just demonstrates how everything was in place because the team just carried on regardless.

They carried on fulfilling all their duties that they needed to do, but also continued delivering the advisory to the clients without you having to be there, without you having to answer questions, without you have, you know, and I think that is the epitome of what we are looking to achieve for our mentees within APX training so that they can be in that same position where if life takes a direction we don't want to happen, but sadly does happen, we are able to step away and not even think about work because we've got other things that are more important to be dealing with.

But it doesn't have add the stress of worrying about your income in the background because you knew everything was being taken care of.

So sorry if I've repeated some of what you said, but I just felt those points were really, really important.

Yeah, I mean it was important for me as well because when you take on advisory services for clients, they rely on you for helping them with business decisions.

So if your life goes on hold, your business life goes on, you can't be in a position where other people's businesses lives go on hold as well.

So it's critically important to have backup and to have systems in place where you can continue to serve your clients.

We have a contingency for compliance.

You have to have contingency partners, don't you, for compliance.

But yeah, I would argue it's even more important for advisory because they rely on you and if you have to let them down, that's the trust broken down and you may well be putting their businesses in danger, you know, the worst case scenario.

So, yeah, it was, it was, it was critical for me to have those services covered.

And not only that, because I didn't have an end date when it was unplanned.

Yeah.

Not have everything build up for when I returned because I mean, everybody's been in that situation where they go back to work and actually their in tray as we used to have.

Now it's like an inbox, isn't it?

But we used our in tray that was like piled that high because nobody'd been doing the work while you were away from your desk.

I didn't want that situation at all because that's stressful as well, knowing that you've got to deal with and firefight when you get back.

So, yeah, I think it's really important to have an advisory team.

If I was to do it all over again, I'd definitely do it that way.

Yeah, yeah, now I can see that.

And yeah, the in tray used to be penned, what do they used to call it?

In tray pending to do or to file filing, wasn't it?

Yeah, that was it.

That's it.

But now, yeah, you come, you come back and you've got all these emails and then there could be Hundreds, there could be thousands.

I'm sure people listening to this would, would, would know this because this happens, you know, regularly.

But, but the problem is when you are out of the business and when you're all, even if you're on a holiday, if you know you're going to get all these emails, the temptation is to go on your phone and start.

Maybe you just clear out the ones you don't need to deal with but you're still not switching off because you're being dragged into the.

Yes, this is, these are the things I'm going to have to deal with when I come back.

And, and it stops your relaxation time, which is really important, you know, and, and for you with the holiday with your dad, you know, it was an important holiday for your dad, an important thing for you to share with him.

You needed to be all in so you don't need that hassle of worrying about emails and you didn't have that.

And that's the great thing.

And I think that's the point that we're trying to make here is having a team that takes care of the technical side and the compliance of the business is one thing, but having a team that can help clients continue their journey forward, have the strategies, understand what's going on with their business, be able to have a conversation with someone from the team to continue moving forward is like, it's like gold dust, you know, you can, you can't put a value on that in many ways and that, that's what we're looking to achieve with APX training and we are achieving with APX training also.

Deb, while we're talking about your advisory team, we've got some fabulous case studies on our website that you and your team have helped deliver to clients.

I really love the one about the client that came to you and I think if I'm right, he was paying a very low fee for his bookkeeping and then I think he started paying something like 850amonth for you and it ended up being 2,000 pound a month.

And I say you, but I mean you and your team, of course.

Can you tell us a bit about, a bit about that?

Yeah.

So he came to us, he'd been paying his bookkeeper 100 pound a month and his bookkeeper.

Yeah, let's set the scene.

He had a 450,000 pound turnover business.

It was an engineering company and he thought that paying a bookkeeper 100 pound a month was enough to, to do a good job.

But what he was finding was he was looking into Xero and he didn't understand his figures, he didn't understand his numbers, he couldn't trust his numbers.

And when he came to us, we did a health check on his zero and realized that the bookkeeper had been putting all the money received.

Well, the money paid as money paid and then the bills she'd been put in separately and then the money received she'd not been assigned into the invoices that were outstanding.

So all the figures were duplicated.

He'd been on the wrong VAT scheme for four years because he'd broken through the threshold of cash accounting.

Nothing was tied up.

So because she'd been putting money spent rather than money assigning it to the invoices and it was just.

She'd obviously undercharged, couldn't devote the amount of time and attention for the money that she was charging because she has to earn an income.

So she's.

So she couldn't, she couldn't, she couldn't devote the time needed.

So it was complete and utter mess.

He is.

Corporation Tax was completely out of sync and we took three months unpicking.

We said it's like knitting because he couldn't understand why it would take three months.

And I said it's like knitting if there's an error, if you dropped a stitch, you can't just carry on because you've got it.

It's not going to work.

It's not going to follow the pattern.

You've got to unpick everything and then rebuild everything from the.

From the first error.

So Denny understood.

So we were charging him 8:50amonth for that tidy up.

Three months that took.

And then we also, once we had the figures right and trustworthy, then we could do a cash management system with him so that he knew where his cash was going and, and we could start teaching him his decisions.

He went from 450,000 turnover to 1.1 million turnover in 18 months.

And that's because now he could.

We taught him how to make the decision based on where his, his money sat and what he was due to go out was segregated.

What was coming in.

He had a forecast on and he knew who his creditors and debtors were.

So we worked with him twice a month in a coaching program so that he could start to achieve his goals.

We set out like a goal plan and a rollout plan for him.

In that time he moved to bigger premises.

He had a colleague approach him for a new job.

He wanted to be employed by him, who was senior engineer calibre.

So without having to Ask us.

He could see that he had enough set aside for van tools, etc.

And he knew that he wanted to expand and he could apply for tenders and contracts for bigger firms if he had this engineer in.

So he took him on.

He had a new refrigeration unit that he bought and he put his children, he had three children, he put them through private school.

He also put £2,000amonth into his pension.

And these were all things that he wanted to do at the 450,000 stage, but just couldn't because his figures were a mess.

And by working with us, we taught him how to make his own decisions.

So yeah, so that was, that was one of our clients, but it was not somebody that I, I started.

I dealt with him in the very, very beginning and then handed him over to business financial coach to continue.

So he was a, he was served by the team.

He also had all of our team on or all of his assigned team.

So his bookkeeper, accountant, business financial coach, and myself in a WhatsApp group.

So it was like a finance team that he had access to on via WhatsApp.

So all of us knew what was going on with him.

Any of us at any point could answer his questions.

And yeah, he felt as if he had a finance team at the end of the phone.

So yeah, it worked really, really well.

But yeah, that was, that was one of my favorite case studies because it was such a dramatic change from such a mess to absolutely flying.

Yeah.

Achieving his profit potential.

Yeah.

And it's really interesting that you mentioned that he learned how to make his own informed decisions which helped him grow the business in the way he wanted it to grow.

Yeah, that's really important to us because we looked at all our client base and they have to move forward.

Yes, in their business, but also in their own growth and their own business owner leadership growth.

And that's learning how to make decisions.

But if you've got, if you're taught how to read your numbers and everything is organized, then you can be taught how to make your decisions, what to take into consideration, what to, to move about, what to maybe prioritize in your business, what's coming up that needs being paid, how to have a proper growth plan rather than finger in the air.

Can I do that?

Fingers crossed that I've got enough to cover payroll at the end of the month if I buy this van type thing.

But yeah, so it was one of our main outcomes.

That was a big tick box when they started making their own decisions because also it then freed us up because we weren't having to be on call all the time to have a decision run by us.

They start making their own and then, yeah, they're closely managed to start with.

But once they start making the right decisions and we can understand their process, which we discuss in the calls, then, yeah, yeah, that's, that's what they want.

That's what every business owner wants.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

It's all about learning and developing, isn't it?

And, you know, everyone needs that support to be able to do these things.

But it is really good to hear some success stories and, and that there's a lot more, there's a lot more success stories that you can see on our website, actually, which, which demonstrate Deb's advisory teams, you know, ability to create outcomes that the clients are looking for.

So if you were to go to apxtraining.co.uk and then if you click on the about APX team and deb section and scroll down to the bottom, you'll see a little section underneath Deb saying, read the success stories, have a look.

Have a look and read the success stories honestly.

And bear in mind that those success stories come from team delivery of advisory.

So, you know, it's important that we share this message to people that we, we, we say it quite a lot that we've walked the walk.

I mean, don't just talk the talk and we actually generally mean it, hence why we feel that we're in the right position to be able to, to share our knowledge and help others create these teams.

So.

So, yeah, thanks for sharing that, Deb.

I guess I suppose I better talk about my, my kind of experience, really.

Had a night.

It's always harder to talk about yourself, isn't it?

But it is what it is.

So, yeah.

So as anyone who's listened to this regularly will know, I solved my accountancy practice as I transitioned into delivering advisory and then I moved into running a membership organization that delivered a certain cash management strategy was the main focus, but it enabled people to move into the ward of advisory.

So when I began running that, that membership and I bought accounting and bookkeeping practice owners into the membership, Deb, you being the first one that joined, obviously, as we know, I became kind of the mentor to, to the members and I educated them on how to deliver advisory, how to build advisory offer, how to deliver it to clients and how to focus on achieving their client outcomes.

All well and good, but it was me doing it all.

And it wasn't too long into the journey that it suddenly dawned on me that actually I was becoming a bottleneck.

And there was only so many conversations I could have in, in.

In a week.

There's only so many of the members I could, I could serve.

So I changed a couple of things up.

You know, I brought people into, into groups, we started taking people on in cohorts.

And so there were a few things that I introduced that helped kind of, you know, balance that out a little bit.

But it wasn't until I then started to build my own team.

You know, I built a team of guides, basically.

So, yeah, I led them, I trained them, I helped them feel empowered to be able to take control of conversations during, during calls.

Um, we would have calls that were one to one with members, but then we would have a lot of group calls, a lot of sessions where there were numerous practice owners and members on the call.

And that's where I wanted the team of guys to be able to feel confident and feel comfortable that they could speak up, answer a question if they had an answer, be proactive with how they wanted to support different members with different strategies.

Because what we would do is we had our own WhatsApp group, similar to what you said, it was just for our team.

And we also had.

We generally had weekly meetings.

And what we would do is we would discuss the individual members and we would think about the calls that we were going to have, the sessions we were going to be holding coming up, and we would think about who needed help in certain areas.

And so we would identify the areas that support was needed, and we would focus on that as a topic for the session.

But always, we would always allow the members to respond and to give their thoughts and their perspectives and help each other along, because that was the power of the conversation and all the peers being in the same group together.

So it became a kind of art of facilitating in many ways, sometimes the conversations.

And the more I learned to do that, I was able to allow the team of guides to start to do the same thing and start to understand when to step in, when to actually allow the room to be quiet and see if someone else has a thought that they want to share.

And it's quite an important kind of quality to learn, I would say.

And then of course, the next stage from that was I was able to choose not to.

Not to go to those calls if I didn't want to.

I wasn't necessarily needed any longer, which for some people might find that hard.

I actually quite enjoyed that feeling because it can be quite pressured running an organization like that.

It can Be quite pressured running a bookkeeping and an accounting practice and to be able to relieve yourself of that pressure by having other people that can take control of situations, I think is a good thing.

And it certainly was for me and it enabled me to step back.

And then as you know, Deb, you know, because we work together on an online portal and things like that.

But also I was able to step back and think about the next steps and how to improve the members experience of being in that organization at the time.

So yeah, that's kind of my experience of an advisory team.

It's slightly different, I guess to yours.

Yeah, well, I see that as the next level up because you built a team of advisory leaders because your members were advisors and yet your team were leading and guiding those advisors.

So, so that's why it works so well, because of our program.

Because our program is technician to advisor and then advisory team leaders.

So yeah, why wouldn't we put those both together?

Both our experience, we know what works, we know what doesn't work and we've had many years now experience of doing it.

So yeah, I think we're both sharing and giving people and we just want to help as many people as possible fulfill their potential, really enable them to make choices rather than beholden to the services that they've created.

I think it works.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And that can.

But the way I see it Deb, is that we've both been there.

We've both been that practice owner that has felt the pain at times in our own ways and you know, and thought there's got to be a better way to do this.

I can't, I can't carry on following the same pattern because this isn't working for me anymore.

You know, it's not healthy.

And you know, and I think having sat in that position and being able to have found a way out of that and to find the solutions to the problems.

We're not oracles.

We don't have the solutions to every single problem that a practice owner is going to have.

But what we have got is a way of learning how to deliver advisory, A way to then start to lead a team and have a team deliver advisory.

Removing yourself from that bottleneck and then allowing you to think about what you want to do next.

And a lot of what we do as well with our workshops that we're going to be running, it's going to be part of that is yes, we're going to be delivering, but part of it is also is, is listening to the comments and the feedback and the thoughts that are mentees, as we call them in APX are going to be sharing with us and sharing with each other because the power of the community and the power of the support in each other, part of it is also where learning takes place and that helps us.

So we all learn and we all develop together.

And I find it, it's very fulfilling to see people growing.

And so, yeah, there are.

I don't like blowing my own trumpet, but I am going to do this.

If you go to APX training again, if you go to apxtraining.co.uk and you go to the about APX, Tim and Deb, you can scroll down to me and you can see testimonials and there are a lot of comments there about people who have seen me as their mentor, let's say, and have made some very nice, very kind and giving comments which I'm very appreciative for.

So you can look at those.

You can also go down a little bit further and you can see comments from attendees of our Crosswords of Coffee sessions.

Now, there are a lot, but then it has been running for four and a half years.

You know, yes, we've, we've halted it for a while and restarted it and things like that, but generally over four and a half years, it's probably ran for four years in effect.

And those sessions are, you know, Deb mentioned, you mentioned just now that you see us as giving people and I would agree with that.

Backing that up is the fact that we run a weekly session every Tuesday at 9 o' clock for accounting, the bookkeeping practice owners to come along.

They're free, you know, there's no obligation, they're free.

There's no expectation from us, from anyone who comes along.

We just want you to come along and actually have a conversation and join in.

We will bring topics up to discuss.

You may find some interesting, you may find others not.

But we bring the topics up, we allow the room to talk because that's where we can all learn from each other.

And I think as practice owners it can be a lonely place.

So there is an opportunity to change that and to come along and join us.

So if you want to come along and join those calls, 9 o' clock every Tuesday morning, we call the sessions Crosses and Coffee because it is kind of a breakfast sort of meeting.

You don't have to have Crosses and Coffee during the course.

Entirely up to you.

You know, you can, you can have a sip of water, you can have whatever you want.

But if you want to come along and join us on those sessions.

If you go to Facebook and search advisory teams, in your search bar, you'll see a group come up and you'll see an image of me and Deb asked to join.

You'll have to answer a couple of simple questions and then we'll let you in and then you'll have access to all the cross and coffee sessions.

Like I say this, there's.

There's no, there's no cost to this, there's no expectations.

Just come along and, and, and chat.

We love chatting.

We love chatting with practice owners.

We love getting to know you and, and with APX training, we love chatting to the team with, you know, behind the practice owner as well now.

And, and that's really rewarding as well.

So.

So there's lots and lots of things we can do and we look forward to you coming along and joining us.

So, Deb, I think that's everything for today.

We do need to add anything else, or do you think we've covered everything?

I was just going to say people are ready to explore advisory teams.

We are having our live implementation cohort on 29th September.

It's on a Tuesday.

If you go to our website, apxtraining co.uk and you can sign up and you can join our live code implementation cohort.

There are limited spaces, so I would go rush there now and see if you can get in for September's cohort.

2027.

Put my teeth back in, Tim.

Easy for you to say.

Yeah, easy for me to say.

Fantastic.

Thank you, Deb.

Love that.

And we will see you all next time.

Thanks for joining us.

See you then.

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,.

Sam.