BAM Day 2 - Uncovering the Value: The Simple Visual Way with Nadeem Raja

Afterwards, Nadim is going to talk about. He's a member of the academy, doing some amazing things. Nadim, are you there?

Yes, I'm here. Can you hear me?

I can hear you. I can, yeah, because of time. I'm 30 seconds over. I'm just going to hand straight over to you and I'll put your slides on the screen. Nadim, just shout if you need me to change anything. So can we all just welcome Nadim.

Away you go. Okay. Hi, everybody. My name is Nadeem Raja and I'm an accountant based in the uk. I run a practice, but I've not always been in practice. I was just counting the years the other day. I've been in the profession for about 27 years and I can't believe it, I worked with some people who actually were in their nappies when I was training to be an accountant. But I've been in the practice for about, about 12 years and I've been in Marx Academy, you know, since 2019. And it's been a, you know, quite an amazing journey in terms of pricing and also now business advisory. So what I would do without kind of further ado in terms of questions, got quite a short session. So if you don't mind what you do, if you put your, if there are any questions, you can put them in the chat box. I may not get chance to answer them immediately as in the session, but definitely what I will do is I'll probably try to reach out to you and answer those questions to another forum maybe, if that's okay. So, I mean, let's jump straight into. The first thing I'll just quickly go through is what we're going to cover today.

Let me just give me one second. Okay, so what we're going to cover today, essentially we'll cover, it's about four parts, but we'll do a little bit technical and then we'll get into, you know, straight into some practical, you know, what I. How I use, for example, value pricing and also to help promote business advisory services. First thing we'll do, we'll look at quick thing about compliance to Reliance, where, you know, I'll talk about how we're moving from compliance to Reliance. And Reliance really is all about business advisory is what Mark's been talking about. What we'll do is we'll also discuss the three parts of the value conversation. What are the three parts and what each of those mean. What I'll concentrate on is uncovering the value. What we'll do at the end is we'll look at four types of questions that you can ask, which are related to the uncover the value. I'll also then show you how I use that in my company to promote business advisory, which is a fantastic way to introduce clients to business advisory. So in terms of, you know, from compliance to reliance, you know, what do we mean by that? When I first started in practice, it was all about compliance. It was all about, you know, when I see a client, it's all about, you know, can I submit their, you know, VAT returns or the tax returns, payroll, get the bookkeeping done, submit the accounts, work out the tax. It was all about actual compliance. What I found was that, you know, in terms of business advisory, whenever they ask me, by the way, nadine, do you do business advisory? I said, yeah, it's part of the package. So what happened there? I think it was a mistake because I was giving away advisory free. And one of the things I've learned in Mark's academy is basically having a system how you deliver, whether it's payroll, whether it's business advisory, and there's actually a system that you can go through to deliver that. And then you're capturing some more of the value. And also you're always getting some extra piece of work that you're doing for the client, which is not just based around compliance. Now, one of the things that I do use to introduce a lot of our clients to advisory, Mark just mentioned it, the nine drivers of profit. So what we normally do is we discuss this with clients and we say, well, you know, how's your profit looking? We kind of have a regular meeting, and if, for example, there is a client that is worried about the profit is low and actually, do you know what drives profit? And then we have those kind of conversations with them, which helps us lead on to business advisory. Now that takes us from compliance, where we are right now. And a lot of you may well just be doing compliance, but the business advisory, you know, if you do it in a systematic way, you can actually charge for that business advisory. And that's what we've been doing. It's been a journey for us last two and a half, three years. Because compliance is not dead. Because when you do your business advisory, you need to use the numbers. We had one client, I'll give you example, didn't know about, but actually we used to just do the compliance for that person. When this person went to a business advisor, the first thing that the business advisor asked him, what are your numbers? And he came back to us and asked us, well, can we have the numbers. So and that's what the advisor used to actually give him some advice around. I think it was sales of that particular client. So because we are actually working out the numbers, we should try to own those numbers. And from owning those numbers, we can then spot maybe any opportunities that we get with our clients and to deliver business advisory. So one of the things that we do, we talk about a lot in my company, we talk about the freedom. So before we get onto that, you know, when we're adding value through business advisory, you know, what does that mean? So for example, Mark mentioned, you know, just kind of maybe spotting the opportunity because it may well be that the client is really worried about maybe sales or cash flow. And then it's just asking the right questions and then you get to exactly what the client requires. And you might think actually, you know what, that's just not straight tax and accounting. That may well be, well, if I want to increase sales, for example, and the client, you know, you think about customers, you think about the frequency and the amount they spend, you might think, well actually, you know, it's the frequency we want to increase. So that then forms part of your business advisory service. So in my company, what we talk about a lot, we talk about business advisory and what we do as accountants can change lives. You might think that's kind of big Brady Ocean kind of statement to make, but it does actually because, and I genuinely do believe that, because when you help clients make better decisions that then creates, you know, much better business for them. And then what actually then happens is that when they are getting those better decisions is improving their business. It also helping with the three freedoms, the three freedoms that we talk about in my company. We talk about financial freedom. That's all about people want to make more money, they want to improve their cash flow, they want the bottom line in terms of the profit, they want to increase it. Do they understand what drives profit? And obviously we bring out the nine drivers and as well and we utilize that little small videos we do with them or maybe a session that we do at our year end meeting and we say, look, you know, have you thought about your probability? Because if for example, you've got client whose probability is a little bit lower compared to maybe some of the other clients or in the same industry, that may well be a conversation that you have to help promote your business advisory service. When we talk about, for example, time freedom, what we're talking about there is essentially some people are working too hard and they're working long hours and they are you know, spending a lot of time at work and not with their family. So that time freedom is something that once you help them with their business advisory, what we say is that, you know, that will help you get some of your time back. And we ask them the question like, well, what you can do with that extra time? You know, it may well be. It may not be friends and family, maybe it may well be, you know, I love fishing, so I'm going to go out fish fishing, or I'm going to go and do this hobby, for example. I've got more time doing it. So essentially your conversation that you have make a big impact on a client's lives. The final thing that we also talk about is the mind freedom. And mind freedom is all about, you know, I just don't want the stress. You know, for example, if you've got a client who's doing the peril themselves and they're doing that all the time and they're stressed out, or for example, you know, they're having problems on their, with their cash flow and they're stressed out at the end of the month, you know, I guess the money finishes before the month finishes and they're worrying about that. Those are all little indicators that you can utilize in terms of addressing maybe or selling your business advisory service. So we talk about these three freedoms. You know, your financial freedom, your time freedom, and also then your mind freedom. So when you speak to clients, maybe have a think about that and think about, you know, what this client, you know, what is it? What was his personal goals, you know, what, what's the one thing that's keeping him up at night? Him or her up at night? And then, you know, we think of it in terms of, well, you know, is it financial stuff he's worried about? Is he worried about maybe the time, or is he worried about more the mind freedom?

One thing we do as well is that there are three parts of the value equation, or I say three parts of the value of conversation. So when you sell a survey, for example, there are three parts, first of all is about uncovering the value. And that's what we'll go through in a bit more detail. But I'll give you some small kind of descriptions of them. Uncovering the value is all about the fact point. It's all about asking questions, which we'll go through in a minute.

The second stage of having a kind of a business advisory conversation, maybe part of the value conversation is you're going to build the values. What Mark Talk just referred to in his Actual presentation. Building the value is all about building the value in the minds of the clients. Now let's take examples. So, for example, if you're running a management report for a client and you're using one of the, you know, one of the softwares, and let's say it just takes you 10 minutes a month to run that report, produce it, send it on email, the value of that is not the 10 minutes that you've just spent running that report. The value actually of it is what's in the mind of the client. So you may value that. You think, well, you know, the value the report I produce has some good stats on it, you know, has maybe a gross profit on there, has a lovely graph. So the value of that in the mind of the client is going to be far more than the actual time that we are using to sell that, to actually run that process. The third stage of the value conversation is all about capturing the value. Now, capturing the value is all about setting the price. And the setting the price is all to do with the value that you're actually adding. If I go back onto the building the value, one thing I would definitely add things that we use in our company is we use a brochure. You give your client options. Like, for example, mark this one through the effective pricing software, they have three options. So you kind of gauge where they are in the pricing by giving them some options. So in terms of uncovering the value, we'll jump into it. So uncovering the value is actually all about asking questions, asking some great questions, really uncovering the pain or the problem or the issue that the client has got. If, for example, you've got a client, he's asked you to do a cash flow, it's not actually maybe just the cash flow that he requires. Maybe there's something additional. What's driving asking for that cash flow? Is he worried about cash flow? Does his money finish at the end of the month and he's worried about, look, I'm not going to be able to pay my bills. These are all kind of indicators. And the way we do that is by asking questions. We also ask them how does it affect them for that particular problem that they've got? For example, they're stressed out at the end of the month, the money runs out. How does that make them feel? What effect does it have on them? It could mean that they're stressed out. It could mean that they're not spending as much time with the family because they're at work. They're worrying about how can I get the next $100 in, for example, to do that particular, to actually meet my, all my needs. The other questions that we look at, we ask for, we ask roadblocks. What's stopping you actually going and sorting this payroll issue out or the cash flow issue out? These are all indicators. And I'm going to come on to, you know, what these kind of questions are. There are four types of questions, but also what we ask them, you know, how do they feel, you know, how do they feel when they go home, do they feel tired, do they feel overwhelmed, are they exhausted in terms of how they are actually feeling because of this problem? So one of the things that, what we do in our company a lot is we ask those questions and we do it in a visual way. Now that visual way, the reason why I do it because when we first speak to clients, we just jump straight into maybe how accounting mode and we ask them, okay, so you know, what's your year end? You know, are you doing, for example, sales tax returns or VAT returns, are you, what's your, how many people you got in your payroll, etc. So we get into that mode straight away. But the questions that we ask are quite important. They divide into like four main areas. The four main areas, and this is how I use my business advisory when I talk to client or initiate business advisory. So first we'll say we normally take a piece of paper or we take a whiteboard. If you haven't got a whiteboard or even if you've got an iPad that you can use. What I tend to do is the pictures that you see, the pictures actually have either drawn, I hand draw them, or if I'm using my whiteboard, these are the pictures that I use. And I talk about four main things. Number one is how did you get here? So these are now background questions. Those background questions you don't spend too long on because accountants tend to spend too long on that because they've got compliance mind. Maybe, you know, how did you get here in terms of what your business goals, when did you start in business, how many people have you got working for you, etc. So those are kind of the background questions that we ask our clients and you do as well. But normally it's in a meeting. So what we do, we tend to put a nice visual piece of paper. So for the client, it's great because they think that's excellent because what we're doing there is he's actually thought about some of those questions. Second thing we ask them, we ask about the problem questions. Now, the problem is right now, where exactly are you? Number one, we ask them, what's keeping you up at night? For example, is there two, three things that are really bothering you? And what we then do is from there we drill down into the actual.

Problem. Now, how you drill down to the problem, because it may well be that he's thinking about, let's say, well, you know, the payroll is really stressing me out. It could be, well, you know, okay, well, it's stressing you out. Is it because you haven't got the. Maybe the technical knowledge, or is it because you haven't got enough time? What's the actual reason that's driving it? So what you do in those conversations that we have, and we physically write it, so we draw it out, and then we physically write down a lot of the answers in front of them on that piece of paper. We then ask them, okay, so this is where you are right now. Where would you ideally like to be? You've got all these problems or these issues or these kind of challenges that you're facing in your business. Where would you ideally like to be? And then we use the mountains. So the three mountains, significant. They're significant for us because what we talk about, again, three, we talk about the financial freedom. Where do they want to be in terms of their financial stuff? We talk about their time freedom. Where do they want to be in terms of time? Do they want more time out of the business to spend time with friends and family? Are they working too much? And then we also asking them also about the mind freedom, you know, you know, how's the mental state, for example, in terms of, you know, is this something that's overwhelming in the business, that they feel they can't cope? And then we then look at those where they want to be, and then we put some targets around that. So the mountain that you see there, normally we have three boxes underneath those, and. And we tend to write those down. So we now understand where you've been, where you are right now, what the current problems that you're facing, and also where you want to be. And then we look at. And those are called, obviously, your outcome questions. The fourth stage that we try and elaborate and try to really get down on is, you know, what can go wrong? What are the consequence questions in terms of, well, what if you didn't sort this out now? What would the impact be? If you have a client, for example, that was losing a lot of sales because the clients or the customers are not shopping more as frequent as they were like Mark discussed, for example, you know, you had people buying average of 6.11 per year and now they're kind of going down to five. You know, why is that? So we say, well if that continues to happen, you kind of extrapolate and you say, well, if this doesn't get sorted out, what are the consequences? The consequences could be, for example, that, you know, I might have to close the business down as a last kind of option. I'm going to have to lay off staff, I'm going to have to reduce some of the subscriptions that I've got. I'm going to have to maybe downsize my business or my office. So those consequence questions, what they actually do, they take you into.

Understanding where basically your client is. So again, just a quick recap. We do that in a lovely A4 sheet. Background questions, obviously they don't see, by the way, the things in white that you see in brackets. Background questions, problem questions, they don't see that. What they see, they see, well, how did I get here? And and some questions around that. So people like to talk about themselves in terms of, you know, how they got there, what brought them to you. Is going to be the right now, what is the issue right now that they've got and then around where do they want to be? And then we break it down between your time financial and your mind freedom. And what we then do is we ask, well, you know, if, if you don't sort it out, what are the consequences of that? So in our company, how we do it essentially is we initiate the conversation at year end. We initiate the conversation every time we interact with the client. We don't want to overly do it, but we tend to try. If you haven't got a client that is using our business advisory, then every quarter we maybe have a check in and the check in is normally around, how's everything going? Is this something that we can help you with? Are you facing any problems around your business? Have you got any challenges? So if for example, there's something there, then we spot the opportunity. And what we then ask the client is, you know, how about if you came in, if you actually came in, what we'll then do is we'll actually have a conversation and we'll go through this particular process. Obviously client doesn't know, but I'm telling you it's a breath of fresh air. Because originally when we used to talk to our clients, it was just a one way, a onetoone conversation and a lot of the stuff was around Me talking and there was no visual representation of their problem. And it just used to tend to go through one ear, come out the other. And when I was first selling compliance, for example.

It was like the business advisor. We just part and parcel of the same thing, but I never charged for it. But now what I'm finding is that if I go through a system or process, for example, around the value conversation, which is, you know, uncover the first of all, uncover the value, build the value up in the client's mind and then.

Capture the value, what, what ends up happening is that there's actually a system that Mark has provided that helps us do the business advisory. My experience of the business advisory has been great because we got so much out of that business advising. I've just, I'll give you example, I've just finished with a client, he's not signed up yet, but it was a just a simple conversation because what he was talking about at year end, it's too late for him to do anything for the next year. And one of the things he commented on was the actual sales. And, and I did actually mention a few things around the nine profit drivers, which obviously gave him some more kind of thing. Oh, there is something else to my sales as opposed to just sales. You know, there's some things that drive it. So that's how we use business advisory or at least try to initiate business advisory in our company.

In terms of. Quick recap, what I've gone through with you guys, I've gone through very briefly, compliance, reliance, and that's where we need to be. I think compliance will always be there. Compliance is never dead. You always need the compliance to even do the business advisory, because all based around numbers, the three parts of the value conversation. It's good to have a system to do it. And that's one thing that I found in my experience with working with Mark. There tends to be a workbook, this tends to be a brochure, maybe a sample brochure. There tends to be a system and it's all about systems and actually having a structure to your approach even when you're doing things like business advisory. We talked about uncovering the value. It's all about asking the great questions around the background questions. We talked about the problem questions, where they are right now. We talked about the outcome questions, where do they want to be? And we talked about the consequence question, you know, if they don't fix that problem, what the consequences. I hope that's everything. Mark, I'm happy to hand over to you. If there's any questions like, say, in the daily comment questions, what I'll do. I'll probably answer them offline, if that's okay.

That's awesome, Nadim. Thank you so much for sharing that. I've seen some nice comments in the chat. I loved what you I loved a lot of the stuff you did. I loved, as others did. I love the thing about time freedom because I talked about profit improvement early because we can measure that. But sometimes help builders get their time back or all their mind issues like overwhelm, that's even more valuable. Numbers are great. Numbers are powerful. We can measure numbers, but it's the emotions, the feelings, that's where the power is.

Definitely. And it's surprising. You know, it's like indirectly we're business advisors, but we just give it away free. You know, we know about systems. Come on. We're using, for example, Zoom all the time. We've got maybe a system around appointments. We've got a system around some of the techie stuff. We know Excel. Hopefully everyone knows Excel, but so we are actually in a quite a great position to advise our clients. But it's just kind of waking up to that fact. So we've concentrated a lot on that in the last year. Actually, I put a big post outside my office called Business Advice center because that's what I want to do.

Awesome. That's amazing, Nadim. I learned some stuff there. And I love the way that you adapted the Uncover the whole Uncover the Value resource into that visual thing. Awesome. Great. Thank you so much. And I know you finished a couple minutes early, which really helps me out.