Scaling up isn’t always about making more money, it’s about KEEPING more money – and advisory is the key to scaling up.
However, it’s not just about advisory. What we might call “regular” advisory is still time-for-money and therefore there is a cap on how much you can earn. You can’t achieve true freedom with this model.
Leveraged advisory, however, will skyrocket your profits and reduce the amount of time you spend on delivery.
Sounds too good to be true? In reality, a few accounting and consulting firms out there have already implemented leveraged advisory over the past two decades and they have achieved incredible results.
Let’s dive into the world of leveraged advisory and take a closer look at how you can introduce it into your practice.
A Freedom Practice vs a Monster Business
There are some key structural differences between a freedom practice and a monster business.
A monster business has a higher turnover, but that comes with more staff, more time and higher costs.
A freedom practice generates less revenue but the owner keeps a much greater share of the profits due to having a lean time, fewer clients, lower costs and more free time.
For example a monster business might have:
- $3 million turnover
- 40 staff
- 200 clients
This results in 78,000 hours being spent on delivery. In terms of earnings, this is $39 per hour.
An example of a freedom practice, however, would be:
- $1 million turnover
- Small team of 4-12 staff
- 32 clients
For this practice, delivery would take 480 hours per year. If you work an 8 hr day, that’s 60 days per year or 12 weeks. The rest of the time is for you to work on growth, strategy and generating high value clients – and of course to spend quality time with your loved ones.
The above example freedom practice generates $2083 per hour of delivery, granting financial freedom, too.
Compliance vs Advisory
Another key difference between a monster business and a freedom practice is that the former delivers compliance whilst the latter delivers advisory.
Generalist compliance is the typical monster business, and this is where many of you start out.
Niching your practice and working with a clearly defined ideal client is a definite step forwards but if you’re still doing compliance work then your business still falls into the “monster” camp. You can’t find freedom this way.
With generalist and even niche compliance, the value is there, but it’s no different to what everyone else is offering. You need to offer advisory in order to stand out.
When you begin to offer advisory services, you begin to make more money and create a better business with high value clients.
However, you’re still not truly free because 1:1 advisory is still time-for-money. Earning more requires working more hours, and there’s a limit to how many clients you can serve. You might not be underpaid, but you are still overworked.
However, there is a scalable solution that will give more profits and more freedom.
Leveraged Advisory
Leveraged advisory means offering services to clients in a way that is not time-for-money. It’s about teaching them and transforming their businesses without having to be present. And when you do need to be present, 80% of the time you will be delivering 1:many, thus reducing the time you spend working whilst dramatically increasing your profits.
So how do you go about doing this?
First, you need to create an FAQ video library addressing the common problems and questions your clients have.
When you deliver 1:1 advisory, you will find yourself repeating the same things time and time again. By creating a video library, you can record this advice, perfect it and give your clients access to it whenever they need. This not only saves time for you, it’s also more convenient for them.
You should also introduce office hours, when clients can drop in with any specific questions they might have.
Group calls and Q&A sessions also allow you to deliver value to multiple clients at once, rather than answering the same question many times. You can also record these sessions and add them to your video library.
Final Thoughts
Leveraged advisory is how accountants, consultants and advisors can scale to seven-figures and achieve time freedom.
When you learn how to introduce leveraged advisory, your profits go up whilst your delivery time decreases dramatically.
This gives you more time to spend on marketing and growth, enabling you to focus on the activities that really move the needle.
On top of this, it gives you time to actually enjoy your life – to take vacations without losing thousands, to get home at a reasonable hour and to spend time pursuing your passions outside of work.
You don’t deserve to spend your life being overworked and underpaid. If you want to reduce the amount of hours and days you work whilst focusing on scaling up, then it’s not about price or simply introducing advisory. It’s about changing your business model and learning how to offer leveraged advisory so that you can truly achieve time, financial and practice freedom.
