This episode looks at one of the biggest challenges with the traditional advisory model: what happens when all of the advisory knowledge, client relationships and decision-making sit with one person?

Very often, the business owner or senior advisor becomes the person every client wants to speak to and every team member turns to for answers. It can feel like a sign that advisory is working — until that person becomes the bottleneck.

In this episode, I talk about why I believe we need to build advisory capability across the team, rather than simply creating one brilliant advisor.

I share some of my own experience of building an accountancy, bookkeeping and financial coaching firm where advisory skills existed across the team. Different people could contribute to client conversations, recognise opportunities, understand the story behind the numbers and help clients move forward.

That doesn't mean everyone needs to become the lead advisor. It means the knowledge and capability shouldn't live inside one person's head.

I also leave you with a question that really gets to the heart of this series:

If you stepped away from your client work for three months, how much of your advisory service would continue without you?

If the answer is very little, perhaps you don't have an advisory service yet.

Perhaps you have an advisor.

And there's a big difference.

Takeaways

• Advisory becomes difficult to scale when everything depends on the business owner or one senior advisor.
• Being the person every client wants can feel like success — but it can also create a bottleneck.
• Advisory skills and knowledge can be developed across the wider accounting or bookkeeping team.
• Not everyone needs to become a lead advisor; different team members can contribute at different levels.
• Building capability across the team gives clients access to more knowledge while creating capacity for the owner.
• A useful test is to ask how much of your advisory service would continue if you weren't there.
• Throughout this series, we'll explore the skills, confidence, leadership and culture needed to move from one trusted advisor to a capable advisory team.

Find Out More

Visit APX Training to find out more about developing advisory capability across your team.

Join the free Advisory Teams Facebook community for more conversations and resources around building team-delivered advisory.

Welcome to Advisory Secrets with Deb Halladay, the bite sized podcast for accountants and bookkeepers developing their advisory skills.

In this series, we're going beyond the individual advisor and exploring how to build advisory capability across your team.

Because a scalable advisory service shouldn't depend on one person.

Let's get started.

Welcome to a new series of Advisory Secrets with Deb Halliday.

In the first series, we explored the skills that help accounting professionals develop into trusted advisors.

But what happens when you become really good at it?

Clients want you, they want your opinion, they want you in the meetings, they want to speak to you before they make important decisions.

And that sounds like success until you realize that you have become the bottleneck.

This is something I see frequently in advisory firms.

The traditional model tends to place the business owner, or perhaps one senior person at the centre of advisory.

They hold the client relationships, they lead the conversations, they interpret the numbers, they provide the strategic thinking.

And as the advisory service grows, more and more starts to depend on them.

The problem is that there are only so many clients one person can support, There are only so many meetings they can attend, and there are only so many decisions they can be involved in.

So eventually, advisory reaches a ceiling.

And perhaps more importantly, the business owner can find themselves with exactly the kind of business they were trying to move away from.

One where everything depends on them.

I know this because I built my own accountancy, bookkeeping and financial coaching firm differently.

I didn't want to be the only person capable of having valuable conversations with clients.

I wanted those skills to exist across the team.

And that meant developing people beyond their technical roles.

It meant teaching them to ask better questions, to understand the story behind the numbers, to communicate financial information clearly, to recognise opportunities for deeper conversations, and importantly, to have the confidence to contribute.

That doesn't mean everybody suddenly becomes the lead advisor.

An advisory team needs different skills, different levels of experience and different responsibilities.

But it does mean advisory capability doesn't have to live inside one person's head.

And that's an important distinction because the goal is, isn't simply to build an advisory service, is to build the capability to deliver advisory across the firm.

When you do that, clients can benefit from the knowledge and experience of a team rather than being dependent on one individual.

Team members develop, the owner gains capacity and advisory becomes far more scalable.

So if you're already delivering advisory, here's a question to think about.

If you stepped away from your client, worked for the next three months, how much of your advisory service would continue without you?

If the answer is very little, you may not have an advisory service yet, you may have an advisor.

And there's a big difference.

Over this series, we're going to explore what it takes to move from one trusted advisor to a genuinely capable advisory team.

Not just the structure, but the people, skills, leadership, confidence and culture needed to make it work.

Because advisory shouldn't create another bottleneck, it should help you remove one.

Thanks for listening to Advisory Secrets with Deb Halladay.

If you're ready to develop advisory capability across your team, visit apxtraining.co.uk to explore our evergreen elearning and live implementation cohorts starting in September, February, February and May.

You can also join our free Advisory Teams community on [email protected] groups advisoryteams.

And if you'd like more podcast content, listen to Advisory Conversations with Tim Seymour and Deb Halliday, available on all major podcast platforms.

I'll see you next time for another Advisory Secret.

Sa.