Building a freedom practice is not about how much money you make, it’s about how much money you actually get to keep.
I used to run a “done-for-you” agency that provided other businesses with marketing materials. It was easy to generate a lot of revenue, but my take home pay was another story. I realised that a done-for-you model wasn’t the best way to get results.
I quickly learned that providing “done-with-you” services is a more effective way to make money. For accountants, bookkeepers, CPAs and outsourced CFOs, that means providing advisory services.
However, there are only so many hours in a day. There is a limit to how much you can make by offering 1:1 advisory services, and to reach it you need to put in a lot of hours.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I firmly believe that you should be offering advisory services, but it’s time to stop putting in more and more hours. You need to stop working harder and start working smarter by offering leveraged advisory.
What is Leveraged Advisory?
Leveraging advisory means packaging up your knowledge and expertise to create a new service offering.
As an accountant, CPA or CFO, you’ve studied for a long time. You know a lot and you’ve seen a lot. You’re capable of providing valuable financial guidance to business owners, whether or not you’ve done it before. In fact, there are many people far less qualified than you out there doing it already.
When you sell compliance, all that your clients look at is your price. However, using your knowledge and expertise to mentor and guide your clients is worth thousands. When you offer advisory, your clients won’t focus on how much you’ll cost them, but rather the results that you will achieve.
The amazing thing about sharing your expertise is that you don’t have to do it 1:1. By training many clients at once, you can spend less time working and generate a lot more profit. Leveraged advisory is no longer time-for-money and there’s no limit to how much you can make.
What’s more is that when you offer leveraged advisory services, you can charge even more for 1:1 sessions.
How to Leverage Advisory
You’re probably thinking “that all sounds great, but how do I actually do it?”
There are several ways that you can leverage your advisory services to offer support and guidance to multiple clients at once. For example:
- Record videos. Make a list of questions that your clients ask you all the time and then create a video around each one. Build a video library that your clients can look over in their own time to find the answers they seek. This way, you can advise them without having to actually be present.
- Q+A sessions. Another way to leverage advisory services is to host Q+A sessions with multiple clients at once via Zoom. This way, you can provide value to many clients from all over the world at once. I do this with my clients three times per week. If you wish, you can also upload recordings of the sessions to your aforementioned video library.
- Mastermind.This is a great option if you’re nervous about offering advisory, since you act as a facilitator rather than the person sharing the information. You gather a group of businesses together and help them to brainstorm and overcome their challenges.
Better Profits
This approach can earn you a life of freedom without having to spend hours and hours delivering advisory. Better still, you can hang onto up to 70-80% of your profits instead of the average 20-30% you’d retain from offering traditional accountancy services.
You don’t need to hire more team members or invest thousands of pounds to start offering leveraged advisory. You don’t need to recruit more qualified accountants and bookkeepers to serve your clients, either. It’s your specific expertise they’re after, and you can serve them all at once.
This is the approach I take to my business. Each week, I spend just five or six hours serving clients and then focus the rest of my time on sales and marketing. I work an average of 20-30 hours a week and watch my profits grow.
A Faster Horse or a Motorcar?
Speaking from experience, offering leveraged advisory is the key to a freedom lifestyle. Your profits will skyrocket, granting you financial freedom, whilst the amount of hours you spend working will decrease, resulting in time freedom.
Take it from me: you don’t need to build a faster horse. There’s a limit to the speed horses can achieve. What you need to do instead is weave in new service offerings and build a motorcar to fast-track you towards freedom.
