BAM Day 3 - How to Deliver Advisory Services to Your Clients with Neil Criddle

Want to bring the amazing Neil Kriddle onto the stream. Neil, hello, how are you?

Hello, I'm good. Can you hear me?

I can hear you perfectly fine and thank you so much for your session earlier. People loved it. I thought there'd be other people putting their webcams on, but they were all shy, so it was the Neil and Jessica Show. So, Neil, thank you for doing that. Anyway, I know that you've got loads of stuff to cover, so I'm going to shut up and let you do your things. I think I've mentioned several times over the last couple of days a bit about you and your amazing story. I'm sure you'll repeat it. Anyway, so over to my good friend Neil.

Cool, thank you. I think I've got about half an hour or so and I do like to waffle, so I've not scripted anything. This is going to be kind of purely off the cuff and actually I should be on the beach, so stopping cocktails and getting sunburned right now. But unfortunately my daughter's passport didn't come, so I've had to cancel my holiday. But I'm here and doing this live, so they get every cloud and all that. So, yes, my name is Neil and I formed my business called Neil's Data consultancy back in January 2020. I will say, like, if you've got questions, I'll try and keep my eye on the. On the chats. If you've got any questions, I'll try and answer them as I go. But yeah, just kind of a little bit about my background. I've heard a lot of people speak over the last three days. They've been in accountancy for, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 years.

I worked in industry within finance, but I hadn't actually worked for an accountancy practice until I set my business. So you could say I've worked in accountancy practice for about two and a half years. So I feel a little bit kind of pressured by all these other sort of, of modelists of the industry in this conference. But, yeah, there you go. About two and a half years.

I joined Mark's Academy roughly the same sort of time. So I followed Mark since kind of mid-2019, stalked him for a little bit, rinsed him of all his of his free webinars and resources. And then when I was kind of planting the seeds of my business, when in fact I lost my job in January 2020, I decided to join the Academy. At that point point, I only had about three or four clients. But Mark is. Has Kind of been there, I guess, right since the beginning. And if I can tell you now that within two and a half years I've grown to about 120 clients.

I've just. This week I've just recorded half a million in fees, half a million pounds in fees since I started two and a half years ago, which.

I don't know, it sounds crazy. I remember crying on the 15th of January 2020. I was crying on the phone to my wife because I said I couldn't do it. I was doing a difficult piece of work on day one after losing my job, I couldn't do it. And I say here now in an office with two guys that work with me and I've generated over over half a million pounds in fees in two and a half years. It's crazy, it's bonkers. But that, that's kind of my story. And throughout my career, I should say, I. I kind of. I gravitated towards advisory because I like to talk to people and I feel like I can talk to people about numbers and kind of, you know, sort of transcend, transcend kind of the understanding of numbers to people. So I'm chartered, I've been chartered for 10 years with SEMA here in the UK, I would say. Actually, I don't think I'm much. Where I'm from, I'm just outside Bristol in the southwest of the UK, so qualified with SEMA in 2012, just coming up 10 years. But since kind of qualifying, I've worked within a commercial kind of aspect, within finance, finance. Com, finance departments in big corporate organizations. So I can talk about numbers.

Kind of moving on in terms of how I've grown so quickly, I'm not going to lie that the pandemic was a perfect storm for me because a lot of accountants locally were kind of shutting up shop. A lot were furloughing staff, a lot weren't answering client queries on all the different schemes, loans, grants, you name it. And here was me kind of with Mark's assistance as part of his value pricing academy.

Doing the opposite and being a nuisance on social media and kind of sharing my pages and sharing to people what I was about, what my background was, what I could do for people.

And video. Doing video content has, has really, really helped.

More so now than in the early days, but certainly to get that kind of boost in the early sort of few months. I remember my first, I think my first video was in February 2020, a couple of weeks after I started the business. And it was, it was crap. I Had a big overcoat on. It was really freezing cold. I was walking in the field behind my house, gibbering, waffling kind of bit. What I'm doing now, I think I spoke about a few new clients. I had introduced people to me who I was, my name, it was rubbish. But I remember within a month I had a new engagement turned into a client and I asked him how he found out about me and he said, oh, I saw you little intro video that you did back a few weeks ago.

That client just wanted compliance activity. At the time, I think he was, I don't know, about 150, 160 pounds per month on a fixed fee basis.

He's now over £1,000amonth within. Within a year. I think we did his first year renewal and he basically signed up to every single advisory thing that I could do and he was prepared to pay the top whack in terms of the package I offered him as well. So video works. Video really, really works. And coupled with my Facebook group, which if you haven't, if you don't know what it is, I'll put a strap line at the top there. So that. That's a strap line that has kind of followed me around. It's kind of stuck with me. That's the name of the Facebook group. There's about 1400 people in there. I started that at the same sort of time. So February 2020, before the pandemic, before the lockdown and again, perfect storm with the pandemic, it turned into a massive vehicle to basically promote myself, share the really good stuff that I wanted to talk to people about. The. I guess my business page was still quite junior. I only had a couple of hundred likes or follows, I think at that point. And. And I wanted to kind of spread the, the reach and the engagement further and again, kind of learning from Mark and his Marketing Monday section within the Academy, I knew the answer was to create a group. Didn't know what I was going to do with it, I didn't know if it was going to work, but I thought, wow, it's free for a first thing. With only a handful of clients, I was, I was trying to do things on the cheap.

And within a couple of weeks it was working. People were kind of flooding in, they were making use of the content. All the posts that I was doing were being seen by more people. And then as all the pandemic and all the government schemes and everything started to kind of come around, it was a really good place to kind of share everything. In one place.

Cynically, it's a marketing tool. I have used it and I have got some fairly interesting, decent, well paying clients from it. But it's a real community feel and I think kind of demystifying finance and making it fun and making it a place where you can ask questions. You're not going to get, you know, kind of backlash in terms of answers that you can get on some forums and some online kind of locations was what I wanted to do. So that, that's really worked and that's really, really cool as well. But yeah, kind of one takeaway. Mark's mentioned it before but video for me has, has really worked and it's kind of helped give my personality across to people.

Which, which is, you know, it's just immeasurably helped. I mean most of the video content I do is live. So I get out my phone, I do a 30, 60 second Facebook Live. I might paste it on LinkedIn as well. It's, it just really, really works. And actually recently I've been doing some 30 day live challenges where I'll go live for a month. I'll go live for 30 to 60 seconds every single day of a month. I've done three of those now. They're really quite cool to do. Mix it up with business and personal. It could be me walking the dog, it could be an update from the authorities, it could be some tech that I'm using.

It could be playing with the kids, literally anything. But the following month to two months after doing each of those three challenges I've done so far, new business has just rocketed and it's no coincidence. So I shall keep doing them because you know, I don't want to over trader, I don't want to make myself too busy but I know as a marketing ploy, kind of doing that on video is just great. And obviously if people come to me two, three, four years later down the line, they've got all of that history, they've got that library of content that they could look through. So if no one engages with it when you do it live, that's no big deal. It's there then forever on your profile. So yeah, just, just, just do it. It's work for me.

I wanted to talk a little bit about my tech stack so I kind of, I use three core platforms really in terms of the tech stack that I use with my clients. So I use Center S E N T A which is a UK business. They've just been bought out by Iris actually, but they are a practice Management system, hugely customizable. You can literally bespoke workflows and kind of client engagement. And it works as a signing portal, document portal. It's really super cool. I've kind of sort of, you know, it's my bible in terms of my CRM, my deadlines, you know, kind of everything that I need to know about my clients and what I should be doing and when because my memory isn't the greatest. I use with center. So that's my practice management tool. The accountancy software that I use is Xero. That's my preferred platform. I have used QuickBooks, I have used some other softwares like Zoho and Free Agent as well. But Xero is where we are most efficient. We kind of run it like a well oiled machine in terms of things like bookkeeping, VAT returns, payroll submissions, VAT return, sales tax returns. So more often than not, if a client comes to me on a different platform, we migrate them across. Normally the client only cares about the end result. They don't really care about the system that they use. I care a lot about Xero and it integrates very well with what we do.

And then the third system that we use, Mark alluded to it in the previous session is Sift Analytics. So in terms of our reporting tool, it integrates completely and perfectly with zero. And we use that in a variety of different ways of the three core ways. So I use it for management reporting. It could be monthly, quarterly, ad hoc. So we use it quite a lot for demonstrating management reporting. So quick and easy to create a report, the time that you've then saved. You can then speak with clients and really give that advisory value with talking to clients about their numbers. With a report that's taken, it looks like it's taken ages to put together from a client's perspective, but it really isn't. It really doesn't it really that easy. I used to use it for forecasting, budgeting. So again integrates with Xero in terms of budget. So again we can sort of manipulate figures in the future, we can track current past reporting against future plans and we can analyze and kind of digest all of that within Sift Analytics. And the third way, which is really quite a cool way, it's got an audit tool function on there as well. So if I get a new engagement that comes to me and says really want to work with you, I use QuickBooks or I use Xero quite often before issuing any proposals or talking about any pricing, I'll ask to get access to their system and the reason why I do that is because I can then link it up to Sift analytics and run some audit kind of parameters and protocols on their data. Firstly for me it's great because I can see the complexity of their accounts. I can see how many transactions from a bookkeeping point of view.

You know, there's, you know, I can see, I can see where things have maybe gone wrong in terms of duplicative postings or things go into the wrong codes. So I know in my mind that if there's a tidy up project that needs to be done, if the previous bookkeeper accountant hasn't done things in what I would consider to be an efficient, correct way, then we can look at that. But also it's really super cool because on a second meeting I can take a report to them and I can say, look, this is a flavor of what I could produce and it's their own data I can produce. It's not a demo report with some dummy information. It's their own data, whether it's a month, quarter, the last financial year, whatever that looks like. So I find Stiff really cool for doing that. So those are the kind of the three, I guess the three sort of main platforms that I use.

And yeah, somebody who was that? Is that Jessica? I love Sift. It does so much. And their customer support is actually. Yeah, it does, yeah. I saw Swan G on yesterday, I think. I don't know if she's around today. Who's, who's my account manager for Sift and yeah, they are fantastic. Really fantastic. Mark mentions they've got a video in their booth. Yeah, check them out. Another really good thing with Sift as well is that they have a CAT license kind of charging mechanism as well. So other software vendors, from a reporting point of view that I won't mention, but they, they kind of charge based on companies or, or you know, kind of tiered per amount of companies. When I first wanted to use reporting software I didn't have awful lot of money and I wanted to use something that gave me kind of the best of everything but I knew wasn't going to financially kind of hinder me the more companies that I added. What it means is that I can experiment with new clients or even existing clients that haven't got an advisory service with me and it doesn't cost me any money in addition to what I already pay. So if they, if they, if they're not fussed about the reporting then that's fine, it's nothing lost. Whereas if they do, they look at the report and think, oh, that looks pretty cool, then that's a, that's an upsell that I can provide to them. And again, there's no additional cost for me within sif, so that, that's pretty cool as well.

And Swanshees, just give me a little kiss emoji. So thank you very much for that. In terms of what I really wanted to kind of talk about today, and I'm conscious of time, I wanted to kind of demonstrate, I've already kind of partially demonstrated how I deliver advisory service advisory services to my clients. But I also wanted to kind of do a bit of advisory inception and kind of say, well, how do I deliver advisory services to my clients clients? And I've got a few case studies that I kind of sort of cherry pit that I think hopefully sort of demonstrate what I do with my clients and hopefully that can kind of sort of translate to how hands on I am and how nosy I am with my clients businesses because the more I know about them, the better I can serve them. It weds us closer from an engagement point of view and everyone's really happy. So it's just kind of a no brainer to do to do that sort of thing. So my first client is a, is a piano tutor and she, she does one to one piano tutoring. She used to do it from her residence, she has a little studio in there. And we were trying to figure out early, we're talking maybe over two years ago, we were trying to figure out basically how to maximize what she does. There's only one of her, she doesn't have any staff.

But she, and she loves her students but she wanted to do more of what she loved. So we knew that we couldn't clone her. So that was a thing, one kind of strike off the list. Um, so we talked about online learning in order to reach people that were further away.

So you know, she's got a quite a good local reach. But obviously being one to one, you're not going to get people traveling from London or Manchester or Birmingham to have tutoring with her. So we started experimenting with Zoom and we basically kind of got our iPad up and we did some testing again, kind of not really in the finance sphere. I was kind of sort of winging this to a little degree myself. But we were kind of trying to figure out how to not mirror the screen so that what she was playing like you know, camera on the keys, how she could maybe demonstrate something over a virtual way and a virtual means. And this was before lockdown and before The Pandemic. So, you know, kind of thinking ahead in terms of what we could do to sort of maximize her output.

She tended to teach around kind of 8 to 10 in the morning and maybe 4 till 7 in the evening. Obviously, you know, kids, I should say the majority of her students were children, not all children, but the majority, probably 80, 90%, but they were at school during the day. So she wanted to potentially teach abroad to maybe look at different time zones to fill those gaps where she was doing potential admin or where she had kind of dead spots in her diary.

So she started doing online lessons before the pandemic and before lockdown and she then fully transitioned to online lessons.

Which, you know, in hindsight it was a good job that we did that work early because she kind of hit the ground running. There wasn't really too much kind of interruption in terms of her schedule. I think she would probably secretly still prefer the one to one tutoring. She's, she's quite hands on and engaged sort of person, but nevertheless she could still do what she was doing and she was still giving a really top notch, a star kind of service.

And so we then talked about, well how about thinking about one to many instead of one to one as part of what she does. She doesn't just do tutoring in terms of practical, she does theory and a cut. Long story short, we devised some packages whereby she could deliver theory to a bit like Mark's Value Pricing Academy to a selection of people. Which meant that she was only doing a one hour session, but she's getting 20 times the income in terms of what she was doing one to one.

She's, she's done several programs. They've all seemed to work really, really well. She does resources as well.

So that's, that's, that's kind of my first case study in terms of how, how we kind of got her thinking of, you know, doing things in a different way. She doesn't have to rely on being there in person in terms of doing one to one training. You know, she's now got other resources and things like that that she does. She, she sells separately as well and she's also looking at games as well, so musical games for children. So kind of all of this sort of developed with, with Lockdown, the Pandemic and ways of doing things a bit more virtually. But that was kind of one thing that I wanted to talk to everyone about. The second one was a removals company. Now they, they do domestic and commercial removals here in the uk, all over the country, but they're based in Southwest and they wanted to. Well, essentially, if I take a step back.

They were pricing fairly, kind of fairly intelligently in terms of the actual move that they were doing. So they were looking at different parameters in terms of size of house, number of rooms, location, A and B to move to. So they were kind of really, kind of thinking about their pricing. But what struck me was their storage cost. Their storage and their packaging costs, which were pretty much one price, three for everything. And I, I immediately jumped on this to say, look, you know me as a customer, if I'm paying, let's say four to five thousand pounds for a move, you're looking after all of my possessions.

And let's say it's a big move, I'm going across country and things have got to go into storage overnight, two nights, seven nights, whatever. If you're telling me that I've got to pay £200 to protect my potentially tens of thousands of pounds worth of possessions and I'm already paying you five grand for a move anyway, then, you know, one, one or two hundred pounds, whatever. I said that that is a small amount of money. But if you were to say to me, we will give you three options to, to do your packaging in your storage and we'll tear it so that you can get enhanced packaging in terms of the quality of the materials that we use. So it won't just be standard cardboard boxes, it'll be cardboard boxes and it'll be shrink wrapped and there'll be bubble wrap inside and there'll be, you know, kind of different, different things that they would do big, like compression kits for, for breakables. And then when we talk about storage, it was kind of like, well, insurance related, you know. Do you offer insurance with the storage right now? Okay, you do? Well, other different tiers of insurance that you could offer for, for higher levels of COVID that covers different things. Not all insurance would cover Lego, for example, as it's classified as a breakable, as a damageable one. You know, I really like Lego, really important for me. So we, we went then from saying, well, you're offering £200 right now. You're basically clearing your costs in terms of what you're paying for this storage container to hire. So why don't we say, well, let's, let's say 2, 3 and £400. There's three different options and the £400 pound tier basically guarantees that they'll get a fully, you know, fully gold, a star service, whatever you want to call it, premium service.

They did it. And for the first six months, I think roughly for the first six months, they paid for their storage costs for the year. So if the storage containers were empty for the second half of the year, the margin that they made in the first half of the year covered all of those costs. And what they're finding now is that they're probably underpricing. So they're finding that people really do treasure their possessions, which, you know, funny that. And they are willing to pay an extra couple of hundred pounds for that premium tier storage and packaging service. So they're now looking, I think they've reviewed the prices maybe two or three times. We're talking over two years maybe.

So again, that, that was something that I said, look, you know, for people for storage, especially with, if they've got to go into storage, they've got to go into storage, they're going to have to pay something. So let's make it, you know, more about what they are prepared to buy rather than what you're prepared to charge. So that was case study number two. And then my final one, and I've got a slide here, which I'll show in a minute, is a web developer who was on the cusp of doing really amazing things. He wanted to hire someone to help him out. I think previously he used a lot of freelancers so he wanted to hire someone, but he was really struggling because the nature of web development work is it's project based. You know, if you've got a steady pipeline, great and if you've got strong conversion skills, great. But if something dies for a couple of months and you know, for whatever reason, you know, the pandemic is an example, you've then got, you know, fixed costs that you might not necessarily be able to cover unless you've got clearly some, some cash reserves built up. But it's quite a young business in terms of both sort of client base and its kind of maturity as well. So my thought process immediately was to say, well, how do we go from having variable income to having fixed income? What, what, what can we do from a bread and butter basics perspective that says you're guaranteed to get this money every single month even if you're not working on any websites or doing any development. They do app development as well. They do other, they, they build CRM systems stuff. So what I decided to chat to him about in one of our advisory sessions was this and I'll share now I'll take my ugly mug out of the way.

What, what he told me could be registered as A kind of a retainer based service is some of the things that you're seeing here. So a lot of the stuff that he was doing in the bronze package and I call out things like security monitoring, things like updates, activity tracking, you know, kind of a lot of this stuff he was doing for free, he wasn't charging any money for. He might have been charging a nominal amount for hosting, maybe £10amonth. The annual certificate, I think he was incurring that as a sunk cost. So there wasn't an awful lot here that he was charging for. So I said, right, we've got a good base there in terms of what you could charge as soon as you develop a website, rather than say hi by never see that client again, this is what we could hook those clients in with on a retainer service every single month and people would pay for it. Because people want to make sure that their websites are secure. They want to make sure that they're hosted correctly because for a lot of people websites are their main or only source of lead generation. So it's really important. And again, with all the updates, they want to make sure that it's good and fit for purpose and efficient for SEO purposes and other bits and pieces. And it just literally spun from there. So, you know, we're talking about additional support in terms of advice, whether that be for advice around the website or actual labor as well. So, you know, if you wanted an image resized, if you wanted, if you wanted a blog post uploaded and posted, if you wanted any adjustments to the website, he kind of created those additional layers. I didn't tell him to call them Bronze, silver, gold, platinum. It's not what I call my packages. I know, I know Mark's keen to not go towards that kind of sort of naming convention, but, but that's, that's what he's done. But he is, he has included some really cool stuff in there in terms of the advice, in terms of the labor.

Again, things that from a free, from a freelance perspective or even from hired in help, was costing him a lot of money. He was not making a lot of margin on a lot of those services, especially the little tweaks, the little adjustments that the clients wanted. Quite often he would just say, oh, it's 10 minutes work, we'll just do it. And he might get a little bill from his freelancer. But he, he was sucked up as part of his, as part of his service. But now what he's finding is that people are going silver, gold, platinum because they value what he's put in there, it's a fixed monthly income from him. So the more websites he does, it's a prerequisite that if you have a website with, with his company, you go on at least the bronze package because that, that is kind of the essentials that, that's, that's what you need to have as part of working with him.

But people are choosing the higher options because they can see the value. So he's now generating a monthly income that's building with every website that he creates and develops. But, but not just that. What he's finding is that people aren't ordinarily utilizing all of their labor support or all of their advice. He's very transparent. He says we can roll some time on if it's, if it's kind of, you know, you know, if you, if you didn't use anything or if there's several months whereby we could roll some together and you can kind of roll some on. But transparently he kind of says you use or you lose it within reason.

And I'm just going to go back to my screen now.

So now he's, now he, now he can forecast with a bit of assurity in terms of the, the revenue that he's, he can generate and the revenue that his business can generate even if he has no websites to develop and no projects to run with. So I hope that's cool. That's kind of three, three case studies that I've done with three massively different companies in massively different industries.

But just the way that I kind of try and engage, like I said before, I'm a bit nosy with my clients. Everyone knows that I'm nosy with them, but they really like it because they're making tons more money now. The stress of kind of day to day type stuff that they do has been taken away by giving them a different dynamic to their business. And like I said before, it really engages them to me and to my small team as a business to be kind of that, you know, sort of stereotypical trusted advisor business partner. Not just someone that can do tax returns and a payroll submission, you know, we're much more than that.

So I think that that's about half an hour. I think, Mark, if, if you're kind of lurking in the background, I always.

Look in the background. Neil.

Yes, I'm conscious. I've not really looked at questions or anything, but yeah, I hope that was cool.

I don't think there were questions. Not in the chat. But we can't see the Q and A in the green room. But I was just gobsmacked. Those stories were fascinating, Neil. And the way that you think differently about how you can help people rather than just the compliance work and.

Yeah, taking a piano teacher and then starting to create a scalable business. There are a lot of people like that have no idea about what you taught her and that could completely change her results. I know you didn't talk about results, but I could imagine that could be. Have a huge impact. The third one, taking a one off website and then getting them to do it as a monthly retainer. And that retainer is compulsory as part of the web design.

And I forget the second one now. I love the second one as well. Whatever that one was, I thought it was brilliant. I thought it was great. Just some insights into some of the practical, what you're actually doing with clients.

Like I said before, there's literally, it's no loose from every single direction for me. Like, if my clients win, I win. So what? Why wouldn't I want to be interested in what they do? Why wouldn't I want to give advice to change how they work and, and kind of, you know, get them to make more money? It's just. Yeah, I appreciate it. It's a difficult skill set if you're not used to doing that before. But I guess, you know, I've got 12 years of industry experience to kind of do this sort of work and I love it. I just really love it.

So awesome. There is actually one. We'll. We'll deal with one question quickly and then I, I need to perhaps move on a bit. So the one question, if it makes sense to you, it might not. I don't know. Mindy did say, does the gold add two hours or increase to two hours.

On. On this slide? You probably won't be. Oh, there you go. You can see the gold element. Yeah. So it's. It's two, three hours customer advice, one hour free website labor for three, like adjustments and tweaks and things like that. So. Yeah. And the silver plan was one hour and the platinum was unlimited. So what he's finding, most people go for either the gold or the. Or the platinum. The unlimited.

Okay, awesome. Let's do one more question because I like this question, actually. It's from Diana. She says, what did the piano teacher value most in your work?

I. I guess kind of my personality and somebody friendly to talk to her about. So initially I did a tax return for her. That. That's how we first met. We did it. I remember sitting in her flat it took six hours end to end. It was all paperwork. She wasn't using any software. It was quite a hard task, but it relieved the massive amount of stress on her. I think it was like two days before the deadline here in the uk. So we did that and then I said, look, next steps, we get you on software and we do things digitally, we do things in real time. And I think that kind of trigger, from working in one way to then working in the other. She. She was never kind of, you know, she had never had that kind of scenario talked to her by any accountant or bookkeeper or anything like that in the past. So I think once she'd realized that, actually she could do things a lot easier and work with somebody that's quite personable to help her do that, she could then concentrate on teaching piano. All the financial admin that she was trying to do before was then kind of lifted off her shoulders. So for me, like, the time and the stress for her was probably the most valuable aspect.

Awesome, Neil. It's always great having one because you're just doing some. I know you inspire people so much, so thank you so much. I have a few things, announcements I've got to make, but what you might want to do, Neil, is perhaps just read some of the comments because they'll probably make you give you a big smile. There's some really nice comments in there, I think, actually there's a question from Bill Robinson in the chat, which you might want to verbally type an answer to. So, finally, one final time. Thanks so much, Neil, and we'll catch up again soon. Bye for now.

Cheers, Mark. See you later, guys.

Wow, that was.