The accounting profession is stuck in the Dark Ages. Many accountants believe themselves to be forward thinking if they offer advisory services but the truth is, it’s not enough.
I have spoken to accountants and asked them if they would like to keep 60-80% of their turnover as profit, only to hear “that just isn’t possible for my current business model.”
If that is the case for you, then you need a new business model. It’s time to upleverage.
What is Upleveraging?
The term “upleverage” is an amalgamation of two of my favourite words: uplevel and leverage.
It’s about leveraging your time and expertise to uplevel your practice model and achieve time, financial and practice freedom.
In order to create a freedom practice, you can’t spend the majority of your working life serving clients. You need time to strategise and market your business, and this is what upleveraging will give you, whilst increasing your profits at the same time.
The Problem with Advisory
There is nothing wrong with advisory per se, but one-to-one advisory is capped. There are only so many hours in the day and so many clients you can serve during that time.
This not only caps your income and takes up your time, but it also limits the impact that you are able to make in the world.
If you want to grow your one-to-one advisory business, you will need to pay through the nose for exceptionally qualified staff to serve clients and this will really eat into your profits.
The thing is that this is totally unnecessary. Most of the time, you don’t need to be analysing a client’s particular numbers and diving deep into their specific situation. You need to be teaching them how to do this themselves and advising them on how to build a better business.
This is what leveraged advisory is all about: more income and more impact.
A New Way of Doing Things
The good news is that 80% of advisory can be delivered one-to-many, allowing you to serve many clients in minimal time, or without even being present at all!
You can do this through:
- Creating a video library for clients to work though
- Group Q+A calls
- e-Courses
- Office hours
- Mastermind sessions
There will still be some one-to-one calls involved, but these do not have to be time-consuming. In fact, my one-to-one client calls are now just 20 minutes long because I have leveraged my time and resources so effectively.
What’s great about this model is that you can even do this with a very lean team. You can use as few as one or two team members to facilitate. I operate my practice with just three key team members, myself included, and then outsource as much as possible.
As well as keeping staffing costs low, leveraged advisory means that you won’t be wasting time on management or forking out for expensive software solutions. This allows you to keep a much greater share of the profits and eliminates a great amount of stress from your life.
Impact
The traditional accounting business model is broken, and it’s time to innovate, which is exactly where leveraged advisory comes in.
Under the traditional model, it is difficult to earn money and even more so to take home enough of your profits to enjoy your lifestyle. Worse still, doing so often involves working horrendously long hours at the cost of your mental health and personal relationships.
Leveraged advisory will uplevel the accounting profession because it allows accountants to provide many businesses at once with much-needed financial advice and insight without chaining themselves to their desks for all eternity.
This isn’t just about earning more money or enjoying more free time, as wonderful as those benefits are. It’s also about using leveraged advisory to uplevel the entire profession and deliver incredible transformations to all of the struggling business owners out there who need it.
Summary
Leveraged advisory is the difference between being underpaid and overworked and enjoying freedom. After all, a freedom practice isn’t about working all the hours God sends to generate more revenue. It’s about finding a smarter way of working that will allow you to generate more income and impact; it’s about upleveraging.
