Building a freedom practice isn’t about working harder; it’s about working smarter. Freedom doesn’t mean spending more and more time at your desk – not to me, anyway. It means working in a way that grants you more free time without capping your earnings. And best of all, when you learn to leverage your time you can actually create a better experience for your clients and provide more value than ever before.
Onboarding
Onboarding new clients is a famously time-consuming process for any business owner. However, it’s possible to leverage your time to deliver a seamless experience and ensure that you are perceived as a really slick and professional accountant… without having to repeat yourself time and time again.
Think about it: how many times do you get asked the same old questions about how to do this or that, the platforms you use and how to transfer accounts over to you?
I bet it’s all the time.
I know this because I myself used to run a firm with a manual onboarding process, and I wasted hours each week answering the same few questions. It was exhausting.
A Seamless Experience
The solution is to make a list of the top 10 questions new clients ask you, and record videos answering them all. You can then create a portal for your clients on Vimeo or YouTube to watch and re-watch. This way, you offer a personalised experience without having to spend hours doing so.
When onboarding a new client, send them the links to your videos and ask them to send you an email when they have done so. If you don’t hear from them, you can then reach out and make sure they know what to do. This allows you to leverage your time, saving yourself from having to repeat the same instructions over and over.
Your team can handle the admin side of this so that you don’t have to spend time onboarding clients anymore, but are still able to deliver a professional and personalised experience that will impress your new clients.
Leveraged Advisory
Offering leveraged advisory services is the key to creating a freedom practice.
Although I still offer 1:1 client sessions, I have reduced these to twenty minutes, where they used to take several hours. I offer leveraged advisory to teach my clients the bulk of what they need to know in the most professional way possible, and spend a small amount of time focused on their unique practice.
You can do the same for your clients. Create a video library to position yourself as a teacher. This gives you greater freedom and provides more flexibility for your clients, too. They have 24/7 access to you and can learn at their own convenience. This also permits you to serve clients all over the world, across many different time zones.
Quality Content
This system also increases your client results because you can perfect your video library to create the best possible experience.
You’re only human. You can’t be on your A-game 100% of the time. When you answer the same question 50 times, not all 50 answers will be perfect. However, you can record the best possible answer for your video library and store it there so that your client can go back and rewatch it as many times as they need. Repetition is the most effective way of learning, and so leveraging advisory not only improves your life, but your clients’ lives, too.
When you have this portal in place, you’ll also find that you won’t lose advisory clients to competitors because you’re adding value in a way that they aren’t.
You’re not just offering coaching; you’re empowering your clients by providing them with a portal where they can learn from your expertise and essentially gain unlimited access to you.
Deliver Value
Leveraged advisory not only benefits you by allowing you to grow a freedom practice, but it also provides your clients with a better and more valuable experience. With leveraged advisory, there is also no limit to how much you can earn because you can re-use your video material as many times you need. This way of working is no longer time-for-money, and only involves a relatively small time investment right at the beginning that will generate a huge return. Leveraged advisory truly is the secret to uplevelling your results, your practice and your life.
