Differentiate Your Firm By Offering Advisory Services

Well, okay, I think that's enough of my rambling. I think we need to bring on our guest. Our special guest is Adam Lean of the CFO Project and extraordinary background. He is an accountant by training, but he now specializes in advisory. In fact, I'll probably ask him to introduce himself with my very first question. So, Adam, if you are there, welcome to the session. How you doing?

Thanks, Mark. I'm really excited to be here.

Oh, it's great. It's great. And nobody else knows this apart from you, but I was on your podcast talking about value pricing recently. So thank you for that, and welcome to this session.

Yeah.

Do you want to start. Do you want to just start, Adam, with just a very quick intro about yourself, your background, what it is that you do?

Yeah, so I used to be an accountant. I graduated college, became an accountant, and honestly, I didn't love it. I enjoyed where I worked. I just didn't really enjoy the job of accounting. I wanted to help the business grow, and so I started my own business that had nothing to do with accounting. And that business grew. Well, after that business grew. Other people in my same industry were asking me for help, and I started working with them and realized that I took for granted the fact that I understood the numbers and they didn't understand the numbers. And then I come to find out most business owners don't really understand the numbers. And I took for granted the fact that I did. And so I started helping these people and these business owners really understand what's working and what's not working in their business using numbers, and then basically guided them on how to have a growing and successful business. And that morphed into an outsourced CFO service. I mean, I didn't start out calling it an outsourced CFO service. I was just helping them, and they wanted the help. And so that morphed into a CFO service. And so fast forward almost nine years, we have a training program where we train accountants and bookkeepers and CPAs and enrolled agents on how to offer these outsourced CFO and advisory services to business owners and get paid handsomely for it.

That's a fascinating background because it's not too dissimilar to mine as well. I started off in practice doing just the compliance stuff. Didn't really enjoy filling in tax returns, and then discovered that. I discovered a bit like you, Adam. I discovered that having a background in numbers, I think was. Was an advantage of then moving into advisory because we could understand the numbers that clients clearly couldn't. So from your experience, Adam, what were some of the things you have found that clients really do want from their accountant? What are the things that they are looking for?

Yeah, so here's the thing. Business owners, like I said, are not numbers people, but they want to understand numbers. They just don't want to be an accountant. Just like if you go to the. Go to the car mechanic, something, you know, something's wrong with your car. You don't want an entire lesson on how the engine works. You just want the mechanic, in clear language to say, this is what's wrong and this is how we fix it and to fix it, and then explain it in very clear language. And that's what business owners want. They want to understand what's going on in their business without having to be an accountant. Now, I think we. We as accountants, a lot of times we can. We confuse those two things. There's a big difference between knowing how to be. How to do the books or how to do accounting and how to actually run a business using the numbers, the things that the accounting produces. You like, business owners shouldn't have to know how the engine works in order to drive a car. Anybody should know how to know how the engine works in order to drive a car. But they do need to understand what the dashboard is their car is telling them. That's exactly what business owners really want from their accountants, to just tell them what the dashboard is telling them. They don't want to have to learn accounting. And so business owners just want the financial person in their life, their accountant or their bookkeeper, just tell them what to do to have a better business. Because at the end of the day, that's what the business owner wants, a better business. And we all know as financial professionals that a better business is really one that's producing cash flow. That's what a better business is.

Absolutely.

Which is a financial concept. And so the number one person in the business owner's lives that can help them with that financial concept is a financial person. Us.

Absolutely. But one of the things I often hear from accountants and also bookkeepers, perhaps even more so, is that they. They feel they are not. They don't have the skills, the ability, the training to do business advisory services.

And yet.

I found it came to me fairly easily when I started back in 1999 doing advisory. But many people struggle with it, and they don't think they're qualified to do advisory. What's your thoughts on that, Adam?

Yeah, so I get this a lot, especially when accountants here, CFO or, you know, like you said business advisor. They're thinking, I'm an accountant, I'm a bookkeeper, I'm not an advisor. I definitely can't be a cfo. But I think we need to, we need to define what a CFO is. And there's, there's really two different ways to define a cfo. And I'm going to use CFO and advisory services interchangeably. A CFO can be an advisor for a big business or a CFO can be an advisor for a small to medium sized business. When Most people hear CFO, they hear the CFO for a big business. A Fortune 500 company, a publicly traded company. Coca Cola CFO, Microsoft CFO, Ford's CFO.

Most businesses though.

Are small. In fact, 99% of all businesses on earth are considered small. They don't need Coca Cola's cfo, but they do need somebody. And so the difference between a big business CFO and a small business CFO is that a big business CFO needs years of experience to navigate complex financial and business transactions and can guide a really large business well, only 1%. Very, very, very small percentage of all businesses need that type of cfo. Small businesses need something totally different. They need somebody. Remember, these are small businesses ran by small business owners, not sophisticated business people sitting at, you know, boardroom tables pouring over data. No, these are business owners that are boots on the ground. These are people that are working in their business, that are at the craft of their business. So for example, somebody that has expertise in construction will likely start a construction business. Somebody that understands how to cook, is a chef, starts a restaurant, a dentist, starts a dental practice. These are people that are experts in what they do, not experts in numbers. So these are small business owners that don't really understand numbers. And so what we're saying is that for these people, the 99% of all business owners get you. They need something that's like a big business cfo, but a little bit different. You don't need years of experience navigating complex business transactions. You just know, need to know how to guide a business owner to take certain action steps. Because at the end of the day, we're not employees of theirs. We have to influence, be able to influence them. And we have to know how to explain numbers in a way that makes sense to them. So can most accountants and business and bookkeepers explain numbers in a way that makes sense? Sure, with a little bit of training you can. And can most bookkeepers and accountants.

Guide or influence a business owner? Of course, with a little bit of training you can do that, you can guide and influence a business owner. That's really all you need. Because at the end of the day, a CFO to small and medium sized businesses is just simply somebody that can guide a business owner towards having a growing and successful business. That's it.

Easy. Okay. So one of the questions going through my mind as you were talking about that is have you found, Adam, from your experience that there is a particular.

Size of business that works really well for advisory? Because I certainly found when I was running my sole practitioner business many, many years ago, and I think about all the advisory work I was doing there was for me there was a certain sweet spot that was my ideal client for advisory in terms of size. And perhaps I'll share that in a second, but I'd love to get your take on that.

Yeah. So we say that the best. First of all, there's no hard and fast rules. We've worked with businesses doing 100,000 in revenue, all the way up to 40 million in revenue per year. But we do say that the sweet spot of a business is one that's doing between a half a million and 5 million in annual revenue. And here's why we say that if a business is doing less than a half a million, either they're a startup, which are, which are they need our services, but typically they can't afford our services unless it's a startup for a, you know, a tech company has investor funds. Most businesses don't fall into that camp though. A startup or a business that just really needs to work on sales, the business, if they're doing less than half a million annual revenue, the business really hasn't may not have found its product market fit, which means they just need to find a product that people want or they just need to sell more that product. Businesses that are doing more than 5 million annual revenue, which by the way is a very small percentage of all businesses, at least here in the United States, 9%. Only 9% of all businesses make more than a million dollars in annual revenue. So that's so 5 million plus is a very small percentage of businesses, but those are people that typically have more sophisticated in house staff that can handle them, that can help them. But again, there's no hard and fast rules. We've worked with businesses doing, you know, less than 500,000. We've definitely worked with businesses doing more, you know, than I had a client that was a doctor. A colonoscopy screening practice is a doctor's office. The client was a doctor. He, it was about an 8 and a half million dollar doctor's practice. And he had barely, and when I say barely, he had barely a bookkeeper. His office manager was doing the bookkeeping and in fact he was referred by his tax accountant to me. I knew the tax accountant and the tax accountant who only worked with him once a year basically said hey, this guy needs help. But, but that's just, just to show you he had a really good business, but he didn't really have sophisticated people on the back end helping him.

Okay, interesting. Fascinating. Your answer is, is not that dissimilar to my experience. When I was doing advisory many years ago, for me I found my sweet spot was perhaps a little bit lower, perhaps from quarter of a million even because I tend to. I found there were a lot of particularly professionals, graphic designers, legal firms with sole owner that didn't understand the numbers, been going for several years, flatlines, profits not increasing. So I found there was still quite a lot of scope at kind of quarter of a million to half a million. And for me the sweet spot was probably quarter of a million up to a couple of million. I found personally that it was much easier to work with a client where either it was a sole director, sole owner or two directors, two owners. Once you get bigger than that, I find that firstly one of the problems is when there's lots of owners, getting them to make a decision is challenging, really difficult. That was frustrating. And also when they are bigger, when they're kind of 4 or 5 million.

I found they were more likely to think they knew it all, they got a big business and they kind of didn't need me. Perhaps that's because I was a sole practitioner, I don't know. But for me it was definitely quarter of a million to about 2 million was the sweet spot for me.

I will say I agree with that spot about the know it all. That's one thing I've definitely noticed about businesses that are business owners that just started this is one of the reasons why we don't recommend working with startups is that these people definitely feel like they know it all. They, they have expertise in a craft and they know that they're going to dominate in the business world and so they're going to start a business and they don't need our help, especially somebody that knows nothing about their industry. But then they get into business and fast forward a couple of years, they've been knocked down a few pegs and they've realized that they don't know it all. They've been humbled a little bit it, by this time they're, you know, making like you said, quarter of a million, half a million, a million in annual revenue. When somebody like us comes along and says, look, you're an expert in what you do, we are an expert in understanding how to have a profitable and higher cash flowing business. Let us team up and I'll guide you every single month to ensure that you not only not fail, but have a growing and successful business. They are right at this stage for our help. Two years ago they weren't, but now they are because they, they have some pain points, they have some, they have some, some experiences that they've went through they'd rather avoid. They want to ensure that their business is successful and they, they can recognize a professional when they see one. So yeah, that was a good point.

And that, that leads me on to another thought that another objection I get from sometimes accountants, bookkeepers is they say to their clients, we can do business advisory, we can help you improve your business. And the client says no, I don't need that. And after a while they just assume that nobody needs that sort of help. But what I always teach people is no doesn't mean no. No simply means not now, not yet. Because the first time you mention a new service like advisory, the client's probably never heard of it before, they don't understand it. They're perhaps okay right now, but just because it's no today doesn't mean a year from now it's still going to be no. And one of the things that we have to do if we want to get more clients buying advisory is keep having us systematically keep asking every year, bring up as part of our cross selling script, talk about advisory services. Because we never know when suddenly it's going to be the right time and the pain's big enough that they suddenly realize they need this thing we've been talking about for three or four years.

Absolutely, I completely agree. And I think a lot of times when, when people like us say get a no, it's, it's not because the business owner doesn't need it, it's just the way we presented it. And I completely agree with you that business owners don't have context. It's, it's not like we're selling another brand of toothpaste if we were selling another brand of toothpaste. We don't have to convince people any toothpaste, we just have to convince them they need our brand of toothpaste. Well, business advisory services or CFO services, that's Very foreign to most business owners. So we can't just go up to them and say, hey, I offer advisory services now. It's $2,000 a month. You want to sign up, they're going to say no or they're going to ghost us because they have no context. We have to position what we do in a way that makes sense to them. So again, we're not selling another brand of toothpaste. We don't have to convince them that they need toothpaste, but in CFO world, we do. We have. For advisory services, we do have to convince them they need toothpaste, and then we have to convince them they need our toothpaste. And that is a tall order, but it can be done through your. Like, you know, I know you teach it, Mark. We teach it. But you have to position it the right way, because in my experience, the accountants, they get a no. They just haven't presented it in the best way.

Absolutely. It's. It's all about words. It's about communication, how we communicate the value of what we do.

Yeah.

I want to go back a bit because, Adam.

You were talking earlier about the fact that we're defining CFO services, that CFO services for a small business is very different. A CFO for a Coca Cola. Could you just go a little bit deeper on that and just clarify and perhaps with a bit more of a focus on what is it about CFO services for the small business that are particularly important, where should we be focusing? Why is that so different to a CFO of a CFO of a Coca Cola?

So we define a CFO for a small business as somebody that a business owner can trust to guide them towards having a growing and successful business. Well, there's sort of three elements to that. First of all, you have to be somebody that the business owner can trust. As financial professionals, accountants, bookkeepers, they already trust you because they know that you understand the numbers. Something. They're weak or some. Some. An area that they're insecure in. So they trust you. You. You. You. You have that checked.

The second part of that is that that you then need to be somebody that can guide a business. Now, Coca Cola cfo, that person's job is. Is to actually lead the team. And I mean, they're an employee of the business, and their. Their job is to actually ensure that this happens. Well, you know, a large part of what they do is to execute, to make sure that the business is growing. As advisors, we are not executing. We're not doing anything. We're guiding so we've got to be somebody the business owner can trust, because without the trust, they're not going to take our guidance. So we have to make sure they trust us, then we have to guide them. Now, you know, as I've heard a lot of accountants say, well, I know exactly what's wrong with my client's business. They just won't do what I say. But, well, you may have the trust down, but you haven't really gotten the guidance part down because that is an art as much as it is a science. It's like teaching a bunch of third graders. You know how to do multiplication. You could be the best teacher in the world. You could have a PhD in mathematics. But if you can't explain something in a basic level, because remember, business owners are not financial people, they're not accountants. If you can explain something and the person understands it, they will be more likely to do it to execute. So we've got to guide them in a way that they know what to do with the information so they can execute. We could tell them all day long, but if they don't get it, they're not going to do it and therefore we will have failed. We, we tell people all the time that you could be, you know, the, the best CFO on earth. You could be Microsoft CFO and have a seven figure salary but still fail at being the CFO to a small business if you cannot get that person to take action. And in order to get that person to take action, you have to guide them the way a teacher guides a student. The way you guide somebody up a mountain that wants to climb a mountain that's never done it before. You have to have soft skills, you have to have empathy, you have to have, you have to be somebody that a business owner would, would want to follow. That can make concepts clear. And this is a, you know, these soft skills, you, you know, you can't really get those in a textbook. You know what I mean? You can't go to an MBA program and get these soft skills. And so it's a big difference between a CFO to a small business and big, in a big business. And the third part of this, you know, the first part is you have to be somebody the business owner can trust. The second part, you have to be able to guide them. And the third part is you have to guide them towards having a successful business. Now, successful is a very broad term, but we define it in two ways. One, however the business owner defines success, that's the first way we define it is however they define it, one business owner may define success as being able to use their business so they could travel four months out of the year. Another business may define success as one that's doubling its profits year over year. Another business may define success as somebody is a business that's valuable enough that they can sell for one day and they can go off and buy their dream home. Every business has their own version of success, and our job is to help them get there. The second way we define success is how we as the financial professional should define success. A successful business is one that could generate consistent positive cash flow on a consistent basis. That's success in our world. So we have to guide the business owner towards having a successful business in the way they define it and a way we define it. And that's, that's a, that is very different than a big business cfo.

Sure. Yeah. And so a really important starting point in the whole conversation with a client or prospective client for advisory services is we need to understand what is success to them? What's the vision for their business? What are their goals, are they looking to achieve? Because until we understand that, we can't.

Help them get there totally. And we can't help them get there, nor can we keep them motivated. Motivated is a prerequisite for guiding them. If they're not motivated, they're not going to take our guidance. You gotta, you gotta be able to motivate them. The only way to motivate them is to get them to understand that you're helping them get what they already want. Like my client, that was a colonoscopy doctor prime example. He didn't really care about monetary success because he had a ton of money already. He's been doing, he had his practice for years. He wasn't really managing it the best way from a financial standpoint. But what motivated him and where he needed my help is what he wanted to be. He wanted to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine for this new inventive way to do colonoscopies. Well, you would think what, what does that to do with his business that performed colonoscopies? Well, it. To, to publish and get the, the research and all that needed to publish and the peer reviews to be published in this, this very premier, you know, sophisticated journal for, for doctors. And it cost a lot of money, especially when you're talking about a new way to do something as important as a colonoscopy. But that was his goal. That's what he wanted. So therefore he needed not only his business to be able to fund this research. But also the business need to be able to afford somebody to replace him as the head doctor, which is also not cheap because at the day this business still has to run. And he wants to spend his time doing research, not running his business. As you can see, his, his. What he wants is that would be vastly different than what somebody else may want. Let's say that that owns a plumbing company or owns a hair salon or owns a manufacturing firm or architecture firm. Everybody has a different version of success. And if you could connect the dots that you are here to help them be successful, why wouldn't they hire you?

And something you were talking about, really interesting just now was this idea that we.

Success is about us getting them to take the actions. And one of the observations I've had of being in the profession for over 30 years and one of the reasons why I think people struggle sometimes with advisory is that you talk about guidance a lot. I always think of it as advisory is a lot about. Is about asking the right questions. They know the answers. What we act as a facilitator. We, by asking the right questions, they will come up with the answers because they understand their business. We don't need, we don't need to come up with the solutions for their business. We need to come up with the right questions that will lead to the answers. And to some extent it's more like coaching. But the challenge I think we face in the profession is that we are kind of brought up in the profession to being solution providers. Someone asks about tax, we give them the tax answer. Whereas I see advisory as being different. It's about asking the right questions and letting the. And then when the, when the biz owner comes up with the right answer, they're more motivated, as you talked about earlier, they're more motivated because it's their answer. It's their idea to grow the business. Business. Any thoughts on that? You agree with that or perhaps disagree.

100% agree with that. I mean, look at the colonoscopy. Going back to that example. What did I know about that industry? Nothing. Never had a colonoscopy myself. I never had a client in a medical world. I never worked a day in the medical profession. But that wasn't my job to be a medical expert. My job was to understand the numbers, see what's going on in the client's business and then guiding the client.

To come up with the right answers. So I, I basically went to my, I did, I went to my client and this is what happened with Every client said, this is what's working and this is what's not. These are the. And I prioritize what's not working. And we're going to work on these two things or these three things this month. Now, Mr. Or Mrs. Client, how do we do this? I'm telling you what needs to happen. You're going to tell me how to do it. Now, my, My job is to guide the conversation, just like you said, by asking the right questions. Like, like, case in point, going back to this, this colonoscopy example, one thing I. One month I went to my client and I said, all right, this month ended up. Ended up taking like, four to five months. But this month, I want you to focus on one thing. You've been getting a lot of leads from family practitioner doctors who have told their patients, I need you to get a colonoscopy.

Their office, the family practitioner's office is setting up appointments with your office, but only 60% of those appointments actually show up for their appointment. Now, that's a. How did I know this? Well, because I'm monitoring all the drivers that drive cash flow. Well, leads and conversion rate are one of the. Are two of the drivers of cash flow leads. In. In this client's case are business family practitioner patients being booked on my client's schedule. That's a lead. The conversion rate is when they actually show up for their appointment. Because we all know, or at least my client knew, you cannot get 100 of people to show up for a colonoscopy. It's just not practical in that world.

But he didn't realize it was only 60%. I told him, if you can get that number from 60 to 65%, just 5 percentage points, it'll add $400,000 to your cash flow. Why? Because those 40% of the time when nobody shows up, he reserved that room, which means there's opportunity costs that are gone. You can't resell that room. Plus, he reserved an anesthesiologist, which is a very expensive specialist. He reserved two nurses and the doctor. He had a team of doctors on his. And the actual doctor performing the colonoscopy, that. That's four giant payroll items that are being wasted 40% of the time. So I said, if you could get. Sorry, go ahead.

I was going to say, that's gold. And what you've illustrated there, it's because we understand the numbers at a much deeper level than our clients do.

Exactly. He would have. There's a ton of things my client could have done in his Business. And without somebody like me prioritizing it for them for, for the client, the client would be focused on what they knew best. And what my client knew best was how to perform colonoscopy. So he's thinking about things like how can I be a better, you know, doctor, how the construction client, they're thinking about how can I sell better, how can I, you know, make sure that the. My craft is better? They're not thinking in terms of how can I have a successful business as defined as positive growing up, positive cash flow, which is why most businesses fail. I mean, let's be honest. Most businesses fail because they didn't have enough cash flow. I mean, why didn't they have enough cash flow? Because there's nobody in their life telling them how to get cash flow. Somebody in their life telling, look, your product market stinks. You don't mark, your product market fit stinks. Nobody knows, nobody wants what you're selling. So let's pivot before it's too late. Or you're spending, you know, you're spending too much on expenses. Or we, you're marketing, you need, you're, you're focused on the wrong things when it comes to marketing, or we need to increase your prices. All of these things impact cash flow. And nobody, not that many people are telling business owners that especially, I mean, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a bold statement here, but especially business coaches. A lot of business coaches and consultants are doing a disservice to their clients because they are making, they're giving advice without understanding the true impact of cash flow.

Interesting point. And you said a word back there a little while ago that I think is so important, and that's the word priorities. Because I find I talk to so many business owners. I was talking to an accountant in Portugal just.

Two weeks ago. Some people here were in Portugal with me will know exactly what I'm talking about. And they had this list of. They knew all the things they had to do to get the results they wanted. They knew all the things. They just had no idea where to start. And it was, I think I said, with all business owners, they know what they need to do, they've got the answers. But because there's so many things they have to do, they are just totally overwhelmed, don't know where to start. And what we can do is look at that with an outside in perspective, with an understanding of the numbers and say, well, looking at that list of 10 things, these are the three things that you need to prioritize over the next three months and then we can help them focus on the things that are going to have the biggest and the best impact.

Yeah, absolutely. We got to prioritize it based on how much would have the biggest impact of cash flow. So that's the number one is the top. In other words, it's like the biggest domino that if you knock that one over, it'll help all the other dominoes. So if they're, if, if they're having payroll issues, payroll is a percentage of revenue, for example. If that's too high, well, is there some a bigger domino that if you knock that one over first, it would also take care of the payroll, you know what I mean? So that's our job, is to figure that out and then present it to the business owner in a way that, that makes sense to them and then just ask them the right questions on how to accomplish that. So in other words, what we're doing is, is taking this big elephant and instead of just telling the client here, you've got to eat this entire elephant in one sitting, we're breaking it down to bite sized pieces. Because again, if we overwhelm the business owner, they're not going to take action. Just like if you give a third grader, you know, algebra to try to teach them algebra, it's just too much. You've got to take them where they're at and guide them. My client, I may want to, wanted him to get to 65%, but if he, even if he only got to 63% in this conversion rate, at least he was going in the right direction.

And then, and that's what we want in the day. Because no business is perfect. Every business has room for improvement. And so we just want to get our clients to go in the right direction. And if he was going in the right direction, then I was satisfied.

One of the things that I would always look for in my early conversations with business owners would be what are the quick wins? What are the one or two things that would get a quick, fast result? Because if you could demonstrate to them that you can get a quick win and they see those results, then they're going to start to trust you more and they're going to be more open to the other ideas that you've got. And for me, I always found no surprise to you, Adam. I guess. But for me, I always found the quick wins were very often pricing related. Most small businesses have no idea how to price. And price is one of those things that you can make. You can make a change to your menu tomorrow and the results will just change like that.

Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I think a lot of accountants, business owners, accountants that own businesses are also business owners too, tend to underprice because we're afraid of getting that rejection. And you know, I, I was, I was that way early on when I started out. I underpriced. I know I did, but I was afraid of rejection. I wanted those, those yeses. But I realized that once I started raising my prices.

People, people did not. People didn't not only not reject me, they actually bought at a higher clip because they, it's just seemed more valuable. But I got over my fear of charging more. Because business owners, when it comes to advisory services, their business has to work. It's not a hobby for them. And so when somebody like us, a financial professional comes along and says, my job is to help you have a growing, successful business and to not only stay in business, but have a better business, they're going to pay attention to what we have to say. And whatever price we put in front of them, they're probably going to pay because again, they, their business is not a hobby. It literally is the thing that puts the food on their family's table. Plus, if their ego and pride is wrapped up in their business, they can't suffer a business failure. What are they going to do? Go back and get a job, though? They don't want that. And if somebody like you says that you're going to help them. But again, it's like we said earlier, it's all about positioning. You have to position it in a way to get them to understand that what you're going to do is help them have a successful business.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, Adam, at this point there's been a few questions come in. I've got loads of questions still to ask, but one came in a while ago from Abby. Let's just deal with Abby's question. She's from the uk. She says, I would like to change my business model from being an accountant to a business advisor. What are the first steps to do, to do that or where do I start?

Oh, that's a good question. I would say the first thing, Abby, for anybody that is thinking about advisory services is to really understand what advisors services are. And the advisory services.

Are different than an accountant, than doing the job of an accountant, but it uses the same knowledge and experience. In other words, you can leverage your knowledge and your experience as an accountant by being an advisor because you understand the numbers. And so I'd say the very first Step is to understand really what an advisor does. And if you want to do that, there's a lot of accountants out there that just really like the transactional compliance. They like putting the right numbers in the right box and they're having the ducks in the row and their T's crossed and their I's dotted.

But the vast majority of accountants that I've come across, and I certainly was one of them, was somebody that not only wanted to make sure that the pass was recorded right, recorded correctly, but also to use that data to help the business grow. Because you're having way more of an impact to business owners lives by helping them grow, by helping them have a better business. And that's just, you're having more of an impact and it's just a better, it's just a better career experience because you're doing something that's more meaningful than just putting check boxes, you know, putting the right numbers in the right checkboxes. You could be the accountant, the best accountant for the Titanic. But the Titanic still suck at the end of the day. So what does it matter? You could be on the top deck recording, oh well, the Titanic is listing now at 90 degrees, 110 degrees. And you know, you could have said, all right, the Titanic sunk. But I did my job as an accountant really well. Then of the day the Titanic went down well for businesses, we, I'd rather help the business grow. So Abby, or anybody that's like, Abby, if this is you, if you get excited about the idea of helping business owners grow, then I think that that's a sign that you probably are meant to be a, a, an accountant. As an advisor.

Let me also point out that you don't, it doesn't have to be a one or all, one or nothing type of thing. You don't have to choose between advisory or accountancy. You could do both. You could be the accountant, the business owner's accountant and advisor. We have a lot of people in our program that do exactly that. They like doing the taxes and they also want to offer advisory services. It's a great way to differentiate your practice from other tax accountants or bookkeepers. If you're a bookkeeper, a great way to differentiate your practice from other bookkeepers. And there's a lot of competitors in the bookkeeping space, not to mention all the tech companies is by offering advisory services because that's something that most people can't do, especially tech, be that advisor. So that's a great way to differentiate. But we do have a lot of people that Says, look, I cannot go through another tax season. I don't want to be an accountant anymore, but I want to leverage. I don't want to just throw all that experience away. Well, that's where being a full time advisor would be fantastic. Now you can be a highly sought after advisor. So once you, I say to Abby, first step, make sure you understand what advisory services is. Second step, ensure that you like to do this as a career. And the third step is just start, start getting some training and.

Training combined with action. In other words, we have a membership program. We train accountants and bookkeepers to be advisors, but we, we call it a membership program. It's a membership business model because we could train you all day long on how to be an advisor, but it's not going to make sense until you do it. Just like we could show you, we could, we could have you watch videos on how to be a competitive swimmer, but if you don't actually get in the pool, you're not going to become a competitive swimmer. So you've got to take action. And so that we, we. And that doesn't happen in, you know, a period of two weeks or so, it happens over a period of time. And you need somebody that knows that's been where you want to go, training. And so that's essentially you just need education and experience doing it. You need to, you take action. There's, there's this concept, my last point here, there's this concept called the competence confidence loop. You may have heard of it, Mark, but the idea is that most people think I can't do something like be an advisor until I'm competent at it. Well, the problem is nobody on earth has ever been competent at anything without actually doing it first. So you've got to do it first. So the, the idea is that you've got to take action.

More action you take builds confidence.

More confidence that you have, the more action you'll take as this flywheel and eventually you'll become competent. So you can't start by saying, I will not offer advisory services until I'm competent because that will never happen. You've got to take action. By getting a training and then the training, you'll get some experience and that'll build upon itself and then all of a sudden you'll become more competent.

And you just keep, continue to grow from there.

Yep, makes so much sense. I talk about the same thing when I'm teaching accountants and bookkeepers how to be confident on camera. If they're doing YouTube videos, webinars, live streams, you can never be confident until you've actually started doing it. Okay, let's move on. I think we answered Brian's question as well at the same time because Brian said what might be the first three steps to change from accountant to accountant and business advisor. And I think you gave three tips, so we can probably tick that one off. Let's move on to another subject which we actually touched on, started to touch on before that question, which is how much should you be charging for this type of service? And a little while ago there was a question came in from, and I apologize, I always forget your name because it just says Cruise Crazy. But the question was earlier was for your suggested fees of $2,000 per month, how much time would you invest? So let's use that as a jump off point to talk about how you would charge for this type of service.

First of all, I love the username Cruise Crazy. I would love, I love going over cruises.

That's a good question. I said $2,000 a month. But really you should, in our experience you should charge a, or in our opinion you should charge a flat fee for your services. And we recommend it should be anywhere between 1500 and $5000 a month. But again, it really depends. It depends on several factors. But 2000 is the average that the members in our program charge. So we do, we do polling on a regular basis. Right now it's about $2,000.

Now there's a big difference between a fractional CFO advisory service and a, what we call a product CFO advisory service. The way we teach how to be an advisor is by offering a product task CFO service. And that, and I'll explain the difference in a second. But a product has CFO service means it's scalable. And so it takes about four hours per month per client to provide this advisory service in a way that's scalable. Whereas a fractional CFO service, a fractional CFO advisory service means that you're creating this sort of customized engagement for every client that you have, which means you're doing something different for each client, which means it's going to take up way more of your time. And you are probably the only one that can do it. You can't involve your team and you can't really take on more than three or four of these engagements because they are literally part time jobs. And most people can't have a ton of part time jobs without going crazy. So what we suggest is you follow a system to provide advisory service so you get the best of both Worlds, you get the benefit of it being a service, which means you could charge a lot for it because you could charge for value, which I know I'm preaching to the choir here in terms of charging for value. But also you get the benefit of it being productized, meaning if, you know, like I take my iPhone. Apple created the iPhone once, and then they manufacture it thousands of times a day. They. They scale because their product is every time an Apple iPhone goes into the assembly line, they're not having to come up with all new code for the software and the hardware and all that. They've developed all that and they just duplicate it multiple times a day, the exact same thing. Philosophy with a productized CFO service, you're taking one system and you're performing that same system in every one of your clients. They don't know it's a system you do. So that way you can incorporate your team, if you wanted to, to do parts of the system. You can switch off between you and another person on your team to help the same client because it's a system. It's like an assembly line in a sense. So it's the best of both worlds. That's why we call it a product has CFO service. So that's why it only takes us about four hours per month per client to do.

Okay. Fascinating.

I'm tempted to chip in about pricing as well at this point, but as most people know here, I could talk for ages about pricing and I'll leave it at that for now. But I will be teaching. I'm doing some a session. I'll give the dates later. I'm doing three days on teaching business advisory, and one of the days will be how to price it. So watch this space. It's next month. Let's move on to a couple more questions from other people.

And it'd be interesting to get your perspective on this and I'll share mine as well. Maria asks this question. She says, thank you for teaching about CFO services. I'm trying to add these services to my website, but I'm having difficulty deciding on the name Business advisory services, financial advisory services, or fractional CFO services, or even something else. Adam, what would you suggest?

This is a good question because it comes up a lot and I have a very different take on what probably how most people would answer it. To me.

It really doesn't matter what you call yourself. Like when I did it, I just call myself a CFO advisor. But it does not matter really what you put on your website or your LinkedIn profile because most of your clients.

In our experience are not going to come to your website first when they find you. They're not going to find you through your website or through your LinkedIn profile. They're going to find you through some other other way, either a personal introduction or some sort of other relationship that you've built. And so when you go up to that person and they and that business owner and they ask you what you do, it's not the time to start selling. By using complicated jargon like I'm a fractional CFO and I help, you know, businesses generate consistent positive cash flow and you know, blah, blah, blah, that it's just way too much too soon. All you need to communicate is that you are a financial professional that helps businesses have a better and growing business.

Typically what we advise them to say is I help business owners. If you know the business owners industry, you said, you know, let's say they're, they own a plumbing company, I help plumbers have a growing and successful plumbing business. And all you're waiting for is that person to say something to the effect of tell me more. Once that happens, then you have the n to start a process to sell them. You don't want to sell them right then, but you at least have the end to start selling. You have piqued their interest. So notice when I said I help plumbing business owners have a growing and successful plumbing business, I did not use the word advisory, cfo, accountant, fractional CFO or any of that. I'm saving the jargon for later. Later when it comes time to proposing them, you could say, well, I do all this and in a CFO advisory service, or you could call yourself a business advisor or an accountant offers advisory, it really doesn't matter, honestly, because you, you don't want them to focus on that. You want them to focus on what you do. In other words, there's this marketing professor at Harvard that coined this phrase, people don't want to buy a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. In other words, business owners aren't waking up thinking, oh, I need a fractional CFO today. That's the drill. They're not, they just want what the drill provide, which is having a growing successful business. That's what you need to market. That's what you need to focus on the whole the end result, how you call yourself, whether you're a drill, a hammer, a wrench, the business owner doesn't care, they just want the end result.

Great. Said it so much better than I could have Said it. I hate all of those phrases. I wouldn't use any of them on the website. Our website should be talking about what's the pain that we solve and the solutions that we. That we provide. We shouldn't be using words like biz, advisory services in front of a client because no client understands what that means. It goes back to what we said at the start, Adam. It's about communication. We have to communicate the value to the customer, what we do, not the fancy names.

We give it 100%.

We have, I think, time for probably a couple of questions. One from me, and I think there were two from Lisa. Let me do this one. Because she said what scares me is that any wrong action will negatively affect my client. How do you get over that? Which I thought was an interesting question, because I'm thinking that actually the negative actions from compliance work can have far worse consequences. But what are your thoughts, Adam?

Yeah, that was about first thought, too. Being an accountant or bookkeeper has way more liability associated with advisory services because you. Because there's legal and tax implications to what you're doing. And any wrong action there has way more liability than advisory. Because advisory, you're not. You're just advising. You're telling them what you think. It's up to them whether or not they take it. You're not as an advisor, you should not be signing checks on their behalf. You should not be dictating anything on their business. You are working with the business owner by guiding them, by telling them. It's very similar to, like working with, like a therapist or if you're a tennis player working with a coach. Like, they can tell you all along it's up to you to take the advice. And so now the liability shifts from you to them because they're the ones taking the advice, whether, you know. So our job is to guide, not do. The other thing I would say that is when you say negative action, I wonder what you mean by that. Because if you're looking at the numbers and your job is to help the business have a successful business in the two ways we define it, how the client defines success, and how we define success as cash flow. If what your advice is helping them do is help helping those two definitions of success, how is that negatively impacting? So in other words, to put it another way, if you give them advice which helps them detract from being successful and the way they define it and the way we define it, that is negative advice. But why would you do that if. Why would you consciously do that? So in Other words, I know you wouldn't consciously do it. So I think what you're saying by negative impact is if you accidentally do it, but it's hard to accidentally look at all the numbers and say, well, this advice is going to negatively impact them. I hope that, hope that makes sense.

It does, I think. Yes. Well. Well summed up, we have one minute left and we'll have to get to the. Because I have a couple of announcements to make as well, including telling people when our next biz advisory masterclass is. So my last question for you, Adam, is tell, let me tell, tell the people watching. How can they find out more about you? What should they do next? How can they contact you?

Yeah, so the, the website is the cfoproject.com T H E C foproject.com if you go to that website at the very top, if you're on the desktop, it says free training. If you're on a mobile phone, just click the three lines, the hamburger menu and just click Free trainings. And we have four different trainings and they're either conducted by me or my co founder or a couple of our trainers. Either way, that is probably the first step we would recommend because these trainings will help you decide if advisory is right for you and what you need to be qualified to be an advisor and how to go about getting, getting qualified. And these are all free trainings. There's four different trainings. Just pick one that appeals to you the most and go from there. Wow.

Thank you, Adam. And we'll put the links in the comments and we'll put the links in the descriptions and so on. Thank you so much for all those insights. We could have gone on for much longer. So perhaps we'll have to do this again sometime and do a part B. Okay, thank you, Adam. We'll speak to you. Thank you, Mark. Okay, I have a couple of oops, wrong button, a couple of announcements to make and then we'll wrap up in four minutes. If you got some value out of that, please hit that like button the thumbs up. Whichever platform you're on, please feel free to share it with your friends and colleagues. I'd also love to know in the comments which you can do while the countdown. Music's playing. Tell me what was the best thing that you've learned. But here's three things very quickly. So we are running, we do it every year, business advisory masterclass where for three days I will be teaching you how to price, package, promote and deliver advisory services. That takes place June 25th to the 27th. So mark that in your calendars. June 25th to the 27th we will be giving out some completely free tickets for the training and it's going to be about 10 or 11 hours of training. We're going to go deep. I'll also be doing a special brand new session this year on how you can use ChatGPT and AI to help you with delivering powerful business advisory. So June 25th to the 27th, mark the annual calendar. Second thing out of three is our next live stream is next week, May 20th. It won't be me, I'm on vacation. Next week I'm going to Switzerland. But my colleague Emily will be doing some powerful stuff on ChatGPT next week on May 28th. And the last thing I want to tell you about is if you would like to have a one to one with me and ask me questions, there is now a way that you can do it. Let me just play you this short little video where I explain how you can ask me anything questions that you like. Have you ever wanted to have a one to one conversation with me about value pricing, about business advisory, ChatGPT, how to grow your accounting firm? Well, now you can whenever you want through my digital clone. So when you click on the link it goes to a page that looks something like this where you can ask me questions and you can ask me anything you want. It's been trained on all my books, my YouTube videos and thousands of other documents content. So you can ask questions. So when you ask a question like I'm struggling pricing my services, I know I've been charging very low, it gives my an answer. And you can also click on the citations to see the sources where that information has come from. And if I scroll down to the very end, you can see if you're not sure to ask me, there's some suggested questions at the bottom. You can also have a telephone call with me. Let me just show you how that works. So I'm just going to click on this telephone icon right here. It's going to connect the call and any minute now you'll hear my voice. Hi, I'm Mark Wickersham in digital form. How can I help? Hi there, Mark. I've heard many, many times that when we are presenting our services we should give people three options. So tell me Mark, why three? Why three options?

Absolutely. The concept of offering three options is indeed powerful and it's something I advocate strongly. This strategy, often referred to as the magic of three, taps into a fundamental aspect of human psychology. When you Present three choices, let's call them bronze, silver and gold. It creates a scenario where the decision making process shifts from a binary yes or no to which one most people tend to avoid the extremes of the cheapest or okay, so I'll end the call there, but you could then carry on that conversation once I've given the answer. You could ask a follow up question, you could ask a different question so you can speak to me via a telephone call if I go back. If you prefer written, then you can ask questions here. And also you can use the microphone symbol to ask questions in just the same way. Now one of the things you'll want to do is log into the clone with your email and set up an account or Google why? Because that means every time you come back to the clone you will see your history of questions and then when you get an answer from me, some of the cool things that you can do is as well as if you, if you want to hear the answer then just click on this button here at any second that better reflect the value they receive.

So there's me explaining the answer to you. What you can also do as well as come up with different questions, you can make it more concise, you can go deeper or you can ask me to give you some examples and I will do exactly that. There are so many things you can do to go deeper and deeper and get just the answers you want from me over a number of different topics. It might be value pricing, it might be how to deliver business advisory, it might be ChatGPT, how to grow your accounting firm. So you'll find. I'll give you the link, you can have a play with it, ask me questions and just pick my brains as much as you want. That is my digital clone.

Okay, so I spent the last couple of weeks training that out. We are still training it. Claire's asked where can I find the clone? We will put the link in the comments and in the description and so you can go along and ask any questions you have about any of those kind of topics. Anyway, we are out of time now. I would love to carry on but we always finish on the hour. So I'm going to play out with some music as I normally do. Please let me know in the, in the comments what's the best thing you've learned today and I will see you all very soon. Bye for now.