Being âmore valuableâ to clients can mean many different things, but all iterations involve understanding your peopleâs current skills, and how you work together to adapt and evolve both them and your practice
Technological advances in the accountancy space, whether itâs for your back office or client-facing, have been rapid in recent years. It does feel that anything is possible.
Despite these advances, coupled with the technical nature of accountantsâ offering, it is still a âpeople gameâ. You must get to know and understand your clientsâ requirements, and understand your own team membersâ personalities and skills.
Therefore, using tech to automate your services and provide a broader and richer offering requires more than IT investment.
Where do you start? Is it the client, the tech or your people?
Paul Richmond, managing director of people consultants theGrogroup, says that you must first set out a vision and strategy to deliver future success. âAn accountant in 2030 will need to be an adviser, tech-savvy and a change expert,â he explains. âThey will need to be widely connected and know people who help clients. Key talents will need to be curiosity, adaptability, emotional intelligence and a growth mindset.â
But these skills and personality traits are
difficult to capture in one person. And from a cultural perspective, practices have focused on compliance services that are defined by collating historic data â which means forward-looking services will require a shift in culture.
âItâs not an overnight switch. You canât just say your job is going to change now; itâs an impossible thing to do,â says Aynsley Damery, CEO of business advisory platform Clarity. ââHistoricâ is ingrained in accounting, the ethos of preparing things based on the last year, so there requires a shift into the unknown.â
A key skill for all client-facing staff is empathy, he explains, as it puts your people in a position to listen and understand what clients are going through. âMost employees donât know what itâs like to understand what itâs like running a business⊠the fears, hopes and challenges â everything a clientâs going through,â says Damery. âItâs incumbent on leaders to help staff understand this, so when clients are upset or cross they will turn to you to share with.
âIt is about your people becoming sounding boards â not necessarily âbusiness gurusâ. They need to be open, help understand the issues and challenges, and to avoid asking âclosedâ questions,â Damery adds.
Focus on the process
Beyond strategy and culture comes process, setting out what you will do and how you will bring your practice closer to defining who undertakes which tasks.
âIâd map out the functions of the firm as a whole,â says Accounts & Legal director Stuart Hurst. âRather than individual job descriptions, Iâd look at job processes and ask people how they get from A to B to C to D⊠then ask the best way of doing it and what the barriers are to it improving.â
Setting out this path encourages your people to change and mould according to your overall direction of travel, rather than a pre-defined job description. âThis way youâre changing the day-to-day⊠otherwise you create resistance,â says Hurst.
Once you understand where your practice is and where itâs heading, alongside a broad definition of how your people need to work and communicate with clients, what is next?
âIâm a big fan of really understanding what type of people you have in your team,â says Hurst. âThose that are more naturally extrovert will likely get more involved with clients and will be an easier conversion towards more proactive support.â
Ask the right questions
Clarityâs Damery believes a more nuanced approach is required, suggesting that extroverts arenât always the best fit with certain clients. âItâs more about those that listen and ask the right questions,â he suggests.
âRemember that youâre not throwing people on stage and asking them to perform, and there isnât âone wayâ to train everybody â find methodologies that work for certain individuals. Build a culture of trust where people can fail safely, let them make mistakes in a controlled environment, and build trust and learn from it.â
You are looking to instil into your people that they need to open their mindset, that the firm is on a journey and you want them as part of that â though some things will change.
TheGrogroupâs Richmond poses an example of how the mindset and attitude must move. âOne of the key frustrations we have is when accountants say: âWe did a client survey and scored 8/10â. Well, you would because you asked the question: âAre we good accountants and do we give you enough help?â To which the answer will be âyesâ,â he says.
âHowever, what if you were bold and said: âTo what extent do we help you with your strategy? Have we helped you grow your business this year? Do we enable you to grow your client base and suppliers?â Ask that, and the response is likely to be 3/10.â
Damery suggests that taking such actions to change your firmâs direction doesnât mean turning it upside down. Changes can be iterative and not necessarily revolutionary.
âThere is still a place for people to do mainly technical work and a need for that,â he says. âClients arenât generally looking for anything mindblowing but focus, awareness and accountability â that shouldnât be scary.
âEmpower your team and give them the confidence to ask clients what you can help them with â ask the basic questions and respond in their language. They want help with the numbers, but also planning and the impact of the numbers and what different projections mean for them.â
Learn from each other
If you have junior team members that are more comfortable with using new apps, and some senior members very comfortable with having valuable conversations with clients, then there is the opportunity for both to learn from each other.
âCertainly, if youâre looking to upscale people in terms of facing clients, then you have to bring them along to the meetings; there needs to be a mindset of coaching staff,â says Stuart Hurst.
Paul Richmond also extols the virtues of training. âIf your firm is becoming more adviser-led then training and recruitment must reflect that. Youâre looking at relationship skills, EQ, influencing, persuasion and the ability to lead clients â ensuring your people want to know as much about clients as possible,â Richmond explains.
Be adaptable
As suggested earlier, adaptability is a key trait in a firm looking to support clients more proactively. And understanding your peopleâs ability to adapt may only come through experience. âWhile itâs trainable itâs much easier to recruit it,â says Richmond.
âYou need to be having conversations with your individuals and using tools such as the nine-box grid to evaluate potential, and their appetite to adjust and develop. But people are either motivated by change and challenge or afraid of it.â
Hurst says: âThe worst-case scenario is that someone doesnât fit. Then itâs about reallocating â you need to have the right people in the right seat. That is not necessarily an easy or instant decision, so think carefully about performance management.
âSometimes you have to nurture where youâre heading. With advisory it can be a bit more of an open conversation and by nature vary â certainly by client-by-client.â
Richmond asks you to consider which KPIs and metrics are being used to measure your firmâs success in operating with a different model.
âWhat do you want to hear back from a client?â he asks. ââMy accountant is always there for me and interested in how I doâ. Then you must measure how often people contact clients or suggest ideas to them â what gets measured gets done. So, forget âwho has hit budgetâ and instead ask questions about client communication or adaptability.â
- Kevin Reed is a freelance journalist and former editor of Accountancy Age.