Knowing what we know now, what would we do differently if we were starting our accounting and bookkeeping practices again?

The answer might be simpler than you think: we wouldn’t do it alone.

In this episode of Advisory Conversations, Tim and Deb reflect on their own experiences of building practices and why they would build a team much earlier if they had the opportunity to start again.

They discuss how to plan for growth, avoid becoming the bottleneck and gradually develop your team's confidence to have more valuable conversations with clients.

And if you're already running an established practice, don't worry, it's never too late to rethink how your business operates and start building a team capable of delivering more without everything depending on you.

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.

Put my teeth in today, Deb.

Welcome to another episode of Advisory Conversations.

And welcome Deb joining us again, of course.

How are you today?

Yeah, I'm very good, thanks, Tim.

Yep.

Sounds like you are too.

Yeah, yeah, well, I am if I could get the words out.

But it's kind of crucial when you're doing a podcast, isn't it?

It's better to speak properly.

But anyway, we'll, we'll get over that.

Um, so Deb, do you know I was on, I was on the podcast, I was a guest on the podcast recently, as you know.

Um, and when we got towards the end of the recording, I was asked the question, I was told to answer it in as concise as possible.

And so they just said to me, what advice would you give anyone who's starting up an accounting or bookkeeping practice today?

And I instantly, I just went, build a team.

And that was my answer.

Literally as concise as that.

And the answer went down very well, by the way, given the whole conversation we'd had.

But this is something that you did, isn't it, when you reignited your bookkeeping practice?

Yeah, I was going to say, well, that would be my exact answer as well.

Build a team.

Yeah.

Because I had a. I'd been a solo bookkeeper for 10 years.

2008 To about 20, 18, 19.

I had to wind it down to homeschool my daughter.

But when I was making that decision of whether to go and get a corporate job or build my business back up again, I knew I couldn't do it all on my own.

Having everything land in my lap.

I knew that was, you know, when you like, have a gut, real gut instinct that you're just like, I cannot do that again.

If I'm going to do this, it's not going to be the accounts lady, it's going to be the accounts ladies.

Yeah.

And I didn't want to have to do the delivery because everything lands in your lap.

And if you don't work, you don't earn.

And that's no way, that's just giving yourself a self employed job, paid, badly paid, because you don't get paid for holidays, sick pay, you name it, you know, it's, it's, it's capped and Everybody sees you as a type of employee, so yeah, you get the rough end of the deal.

They just think you're a cheap employee.

So, so yeah, I built, I knew that I had to build a team and I developed teams before now all the way through my previous career.

But I adapted the, used a model that another business that I'd worked in would used and that was subcontractors.

I thought that's the easiest, quickest, most efficient way to get going with a team is to, as the work comes in, you assign it to a subcontractor because that amount of work that comes in, you're not, you're not in a position where you've employed somebody and then have to fill up the hours that you're paying them for.

You actually can, as the work comes in, you can assign it to a subcontractor, more work comes in, you assign it to them if they've got capacity or others.

And I decided to have a team.

We were eight at our largest and we were countless bookkeepers, business financial coaches.

And yeah, for me it spread the risk because if one of them was off or on holiday, I had a number of people to shuffle around the work to.

And it also gave us more experience in the room and it gave us the instant appearance of being longer run the established business because we had so many team members.

So would I do it exactly the same way again?

I think I said at the end of the last podcast, absolutely, yes, I would.

That's, I'd do it exactly the same way again.

Yeah, it just, it works.

And you can start with subcontractors and then you replace your subcontractors with offshoring or employed offshore a part time basis.

But yeah, I think having certainly more than one, two of you in, in the team is, is beneficial for so many reasons.

Yeah,.

Yeah, so same here.

You know, if, if I personally, I'm not planning on starting another accounting and booking practice.

I love what I do now.

I love supporting the industry in the way that I do.

But if, if I was, yeah, I would, I would build the team first.

It would allow me the time to be able to bring the clients on board because obviously, you know, you still have to roll your sleeves up if you're starting a new business.

We know this, you have to roll your sleeves up.

You have to, you know, you have to be, you know, get things done.

But I would focus on bringing clients on board, engaging clients, marketing, putting myself out there.

But another thing I said on the same podcast that I'm thinking of, it was with John and Kashish, who kindly invited me on.

They also asked me about personal brand if, if you've got a team.

And I said, well, personal brand to me is very important.

I would still be the face of the business.

I would still do my marketing, but in my videos that I'd be recording, I'd be talking about my team.

I would, I would, yeah, I would do some, obviously there'd be some reels and you would highlight the team and you would make sure they were seen and they were visual.

But I would be talking about what the team deliver, that the team do this and the team do that.

Because that way the expectation from the prospect is not that they're going to work with you, it's going to be very clear that this is the team thing and you get access to the team.

So it kind of breaks those boundaries down straight away as well, I would say.

But yeah, definitely get a team on board as quickly as you can, bring the clients in and go from there and use as much automation as possible to make the technical side as smooth and as fast and efficient as possible.

Ensuring accuracy, of course, which then enables the team that you've, you're building to deliver advisory to the clients and do the, do the higher value, high level stuff that I didn't do when I first did my accounting business, you know, because everything revolved around me.

But, but we're going back in time and then this is why we're talking about this, because we don't want people to make the same mistakes that we made in the past.

You know, yourself, when you were the accounts lady, everything revolved around you.

When you regenerated and became your accounts ladies, there was a focus on everything was going to revolve around the team, which meant you were free from your business.

And as we spoke about in a previous episode, that enabled you to go off to Canada with your dad for a month and not be dragged into the business, be able to be free from it, have two months off later on for other reasons that meant you were again free from the business and you didn't have to get, you know, pulled back in.

So those, that's the type of business I would want to be building if I was running an accounting practice now.

You know, too often what happens is we start a practice up and we start on our own and it's not until we're completely at capacity that we recognize the need to hire someone but if we haven't been planning for that in the first place, we haven't necessarily got a pricing right.

We're then creating a massive problem for ourselves in how we can bring someone on board.

Whether it's offshore, subcontract, employee, part time, whatever that looks like, you have to manage, you have to prepare for that from the very beginning.

So it's also important that, yeah, while we say build a team, first thing to do, you have to prepare for that.

So you have to think about what your pricing is going to be, you have to think about what services you're going to deliver and you have to think about the, the type of client you're looking to attract.

So there are important aspects to this.

It's not just simply, yeah, build a team and everything will come.

It doesn't work like that.

You have to put the time into, to bring those clients on board.

But also then it's, it's how to develop the advisory capability.

Deb, once you, once you have created your team and you know you're serving customers, what happens next?

You know, how do we do that?

Well, the way we did it was we start with very simple entry level strategies really.

And it may well be something like just asking a simple question of the client.

So you start getting the, the team members used to asking different questions.

For instance, you could probably see that a client has got 30 days terms on their, on their invoices, but they're running thin in their cash flow.

So just a suggestion of, or a question, why have you got 30 days on your invoices?

You would probably better to have 14 days or seven days so that you're bringing in the money quicker.

And that kind of question that leads to a conversation is very, very, it's helpful, it's more customer service type, but it gets the team member asking those questions because it's a helpful question.

I mean lots of you probably ask that question a lot.

We certainly give them the debtors list, we, we give them the age debtors list every week or every month.

So why wouldn't we have the next conversation of, let's have a look at your terms on your, on your.

So many clients that I've spoken to over the years do 30 days because they think it's a standard 30 days.

They've looked at invoices that they've got coming in and see that like mobile phone bills, et cetera, they're all 30 days.

Well, you don't have to have 30 days, you can have seven days, you can have, you know, and depending on when you actually do your invoices, if you want the money coming on the 1st, then invoice on the 23rd, give them seven days.

But don't send your invoices out on the 1st.

If you want your payment on your 1st.

So it's those kind of entry level questions and conversation starters that we taught the team and we would just ask them, can you just ask this client why have they done this and have they thought of this?

Oh yeah, okay, I can do that.

And off it goes on an email or a message or a voice note and before you know it, they've started having different types of conversations.

And then we would say, okay, so could you do this bit of work for me?

Because we need to maybe do a spreadsheet for a debt snowball.

Here's your list.

Can you do the spreadsheet for that and the rollout plan or cash management and the rollout plan or maybe give them the data for owners pay what the clients should be taking home and they start doing the work and then they can see that the answers and the, and, and the outcomes and then you just start asking, can you, can you send this, can you write an, an email?

Can you say.

And they're all of a sudden they're becoming involved in what might have been a separate advisory conversation.

But, but it's introducing little steps like that.

So they start.

Because if you say to them, right, I want you to become an advisor.

Oh no, not me, that's not for me.

I'm happy doing bookkeeping.

Because advisory has got such a big label to it, a big responsibility to it.

But it starts with very small steps, which is your mantra.

I know Tim, that is, yes, it is.

But yeah, so there's all different ways, but it's, there's a process to do it.

You have to also choose the right clients that your team members are going to interact with.

It's not just a case of finding the patterns and the problems and then it's the personalities of the clients as well.

Because you don't want to have a client that knocks the confidence of the team member and they don't want to have that kind of conversation again.

So you want to choose the open and accepting and the kind hearted business owners, our clients.

So yeah, so there's a skill to it as all skills they can be taught.

Yeah, so yeah, so, so we teach you that in, in our program.

But yeah, comes from a long, a long many years career of dealing with clients and team members and yeah, not always doing it Perfectly and it not working the first time.

But we, we've ironed out out those problems so our mentees don't have to.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And that's the point, isn't it?

You know, our journeys are meandering lines sometimes, aren't they?

They go up, they go down, they go up again, you know, and, and, and all those experiences is there to be shared.

I was going to also mention, you know, is, is, is Tuesday 29th September today and actually we're really excited because our workshops and we're delivering our live workshops later on today.

So I just wanted to mention that because we are excited about this.

We've got our first cohort of mentees ready to go.

They've already accessed the elearning platform and they're ready for us to deliver workshops.

Something else that we will be delivering later on as well is some various financial strategies.

The reason I'm mentioning that Deb, is because it's important for the team to have knowledge of different financial strategies because there are common things, common problems that occur in businesses.

You know, the obvious one being debt, obviously, you know, but it's, but it's just.

I think it's good to highlight the fact that we do also teach strategies for the team to be able to develop and be able to use within their business with their clients.

Yeah, that's a really, I mean it's probably, I would say after the foundation technician to adviser and the leadership, we then go on to the financial strategies.

And there's a few reasons that we teach.

This is how I taught my team.

We had set strategies for different patterns and problems that we could see in businesses.

And it was so that the standard of delivery and outcomes were uniform and to a high standard.

You didn't have one team member doing a slightly different strategy to another for.

And then there not being any synergy when we came together and discussed a client.

So we had these processes.

At the end of the day it's processes and policies.

So yeah, so it's, and it's, it's confidence building because you build up a library.

Like we said before many a time when we did our own technical training, we did debits and credits or we did bank reconciliation, we would do age debtors or we do credit control, whatever the topic was.

But all of a sudden you build up this skill set so you know how to do lots of different areas of that come under account service or accounts department.

So we do the same with advisory.

We start with very entry level strategies that are easy to Explain and easy to implement and have forecasted outcomes so you can actually see a tangible result in a short, short period of time.

So we teach those as an entry level and you do one a month, so.

Well, we do one a month.

You can take longer if you need to, but the process really is do the elearning module, then attend the workshop, choose and implement it with a client and then submit a case study and you'll gain a certification in that particular strategy.

So you can build up in your team people that have got debt management, financial strategist, award or certification.

You've got somebody that's got cash management, you've got somebody that's got owner's pay and you, you build up all these skills and once you finish the entry level, you go on to the next higher level.

And when as you're implementing these with clients and learning and experiencing all the different elements that go with that, the highs, the lows, the knockbacks, the pushbacks, I should say, then your confidence grows and you build up a case study, case study library of all the clients that you've helped.

But yeah, it helps you retain your, your team members because you're putting your team members on a development program.

They're not worried about AI sealing their technical jobs and they're looking for what else they're going to do when the industry becomes automated in AI because they can see that you've already thought about that and you're putting them on a program to be much more human with your clients and not just be an agent for HM MRC reporting the data.

So yeah, so there's so many.

I mean, you can tell I'm excited about it.

There's so many elements that we've done before, but we're now bringing together and offering it to our mentees in APX training, advisory teams, mentorship.

I put a post out on LinkedIn a few weeks ago and it was about building case studies and using the case study as a way of marketing or attracting prospects or, or sharing information.

When you have a call with a prospect and someone asked quite an interesting question, they said, wouldn't you lose trust from your clients if you shared their story with someone else?

My response was I understand why you're asking that question because it makes perfect sense be worried about sharing, you know, clients information.

But my response was there's two ways to deal with this.

If the, if the client doesn't want you to share their information, that's fine, you don't disclose the client, but you would ask permission to share the Story still without naming the client.

So there's that option.

But the second one is most clients that I've worked with in the past, the same with members that I've worked with in the past in different organizations, are generally happy for you to share their story because it's a story of success that they've lived and they're proud of their success because yes, you've helped them along the way, but they've actually achieved the success themselves as well.

So you're sharing their story.

People like their story to be shared.

So I just wondered, did you have any thoughts on that though?

Because I wanted, it came into my mind as you were talking.

Yeah, we, we had a process where actually, because I can understand if this debt involved or bad decision making previous, then there's, there's an embarrassment factor and a credibility factor and they don't want their clients or anybody that they work with maybe knowing, you know, maybe that they got themselves into trouble business wise or financially.

So but the way that we, we dealt with that was we would use the case study, but we've changed the name.

So change the name of the, of the business owner.

But we would also gather separately testimonials and reviews from the business owner where they were happy to put their name too.

So we've got all the, all the reviews and the testimonials separate from the actual case studies where the case studies, the names have been changed.

So they're all from our clients.

But that's how we, that's how we tackled it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The other way to do it as well, start with your own business.

So all the strategies that you're going to implement and you're going to learn you have a business as the practice owner and there's no better way than to, to promote something than if it's worked for you and you can actually talk about your own business.

Now we, if you look on our website, apxtraining.co.uk I've actually got my own case study, a few case studies for my own business in there which I used to introduce the strategy to new clients so that they could actually talk to me about my own experience and the outcome that we, that resulted from implementing the strategy in our own business.

And there's nothing more powerful than that.

It's firsthand experience and you wouldn't be implementing something in somebody else's business if it hadn't worked for you.

So yeah, so yeah, start with your own business to build up your own strategy, your own case studies.

That's A great answer.

I wish you'd answered that for me on my LinkedIn post.

Now you've, now you've answered like that, but never mind.

I did reply, but yeah, no, thanks for that.

It's just interesting, isn't it, because lots of people have different ideas about what they can and can't do.

And, you know, they're barriers that we put up in, in front of ourselves that we don't need to, we don't need to put these barriers up.

We need to just put ourselves out there.

Is there anything else we, we've not included?

If we were, if we were, by the way, everything we're talking about.

Yeah, we've, we've kind of set the scene that we're talking about.

If we were to start a practice up again or if, if someone was starting a practice up tomorrow.

That doesn't mean if your practice owner is too late, it's never too late to change.

Change how you've set your, your business up, how it's operating now.

This is why APX training is here, actually.

It's to actually help you transition away from having everything revolve around you to becoming a leader that enables their team to develop the skills they require to be able to take on advisory to clients so that you don't have to do it all.

Because nine times out, well, probably 99 times out of a hundred practice owners that I've spoken to over the years have removed themselves as the bottleneck from compliance and the technical side have wanted to build an advisory offer, have done so, but have now found themselves that capacity and have found that they are now, but they probably didn't even realize it.

But there's a reason why they can't push on with advisory because they're hitting that invisible ceiling that is banging them on the head every time they're.

They want to keep going forward.

That's why we're here, because providing advisory is actually more about delivering outcomes that the clients are looking to achieve.

That.

That's my best definition I can come up of what advisory is.

Advisory is just a word.

We would never use that word in front of a client because they go, well, what does that mean?

Then you give me advice anyway.

You know, they wouldn't, it wouldn't comprehend.

So for me, delivering the client outcomes are the key objective in everything we should be doing.

Including us, Deb.

Because the ripple effect of us helping a practice owner, of helping their team, and then hearing the client outcomes at the end of it is like this massive ripple effect that everybody gets that good feeling from the team get the good feeling because they've helped someone.

The practice owner gets a great feeling because their team have helped someone and they've not had to be involved.

And we get even greater feeling because we've helped the practice owner without the team.

And ultimately now the client is, is receiving a great service.

So it's important to share that and to understand that we get it, we get, we get it how you're feeling right now.

We understand what it's like to be that bottleneck, to be that person that feels stuck in their business.

And we're here to solve that problem for you.

But we're also here to help your team develop and to learn how to deliver high value advisory strategies to your clients so that you don't have to.

It doesn't mean it's too late for you to register interest and to say that you want to join or you want to join the next cohort.

So pop onto our website, apxtraining.co.uk have a look, have a look at the mentorship side of things, see what we're offering.

There's lots of information on there and if it's something you're interested in, it's not too late, but it's very late.

So if you want to take action, I suggest you take action very quickly.

So, yeah, that's it from me.

Deb, is there anything else you feel we should be adding into this conversation?

So you can find our group.

You can get access croissants and coffee through our Facebook group, which is if you head over to Facebook, search for advisory teams request to join the group, we'll let you in and then you can join via Zoom link and ask any questions you've got.

Thank you for joining us.

We will see you on the next episode.

See you soon.

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.