Advisory is sometimes seen as the holy grail: the big-ticket item, a golden revenue key. Consulting projects, as a subset of advisory, are interesting too: seemingly lucrative and almost certainly a new challenge for the team, with the potential to differentiate your firm.

But should you be careful what you wish for when landing consulting work?

The time value of money (or, in technical terms, discounted cashflows) means that the revenue you’re making today is worth more than potential earnings later on. That’s a big tick in the ‘pro’ column for consulting. And still, what a consulting project actually requires from the firm and its leaders carries more commercial risk than you’d think. 

Between the time, effort, and new skills required to deliver great consultancy, the opportunity cost can erode something more reliable for growth: sustainable, recurring revenue.

I’m not saying it’s a case of one versus the other: consulting versus subscription. But be mindful of the mix of work you do. 

Consulting projects can lead to ongoing advisory work - or, in other words, one invoice becomes many. Make that shift, and you can be confident that these one-off consulting projects will pay off into the future.

Consulting rates are lucrative for a reason

There are plenty of valid reasons why consulting work pays well. You can completely transform a client’s business if you do it justice.

Consulting is basically high-stakes problem solving. The client comes to you with a meaty challenge (one they’re unlikely to know the full scope of just yet). The depth of curiosity and attention you give their case, paired with your expert knowledge of what ‘better’ looks like, can save or earn the client a lot of money. So a premium fee feels fair.

That depth of enquiry takes time, too. You’ll be drilling far into a client’s business, speaking to stakeholders, analysing quantitatively and qualitatively, and then bringing everything together to propose what the client should do next. 

That’s something the client’s business can’t do on its own. Your firm’s view as an outsider has value here. It’s also your expertise that the client’s paying for. I’m reminded again of the ‘mechanic and the hammer’ analogy: it might only cost £1 for you to tap the hammer, but there’s a £999 fee to reflect all the time you’ve spent learning where it's best to tap.

Don’t take those figures literally, of course. £1,000 isn’t anywhere close to a fair consulting fee. Some projects are costed using a (relatively high) day rate with day ranges set. Others use contingent fees, fixed fees, or even a mix of all the above. Either way, advisory/consulting is priced higher than compliance - that much the entire market can agree on.

Sounds good, right? What could go wrong? Well, it’s easy to walk into consulting with rose-tinted (or should I say gold-tinted) glasses on. 

This is not easy money. Consulting takes a specific set of skills that many, or most, accountants won’t have today. This will be the topic of another newsletter soon.

For now, I want to focus on the financial downsides of consulting, which, if left unmitigated, can really take their toll.

The opportunity cost of consulting

If a consulting service is even a consideration for you at this stage, then you must have senior-level talent and experience to deliver the proposition. The problem is that, depending on the construct of your firm, senior-level talent could also be creating value elsewhere. 

Partners and other senior leaders are the ‘face’ of your brand. They’re often highly networked, and their reputation, plus the reputation of the firm, can be enough to attract new business leads. Remember the example I shared a few weeks back of Laura Taylor tracing £3 million in revenue to her network on LinkedIn? Tieing senior staff up in one-off consulting work takes them away from other revenue-generating activities. Every prospect they don’t have time to nurture could mean a missed opportunity in the short and long term. 

Let’s break it down:

• Winning 1 x one-off consulting client at £30k = £30k in one month, representing £30k per annum

• Winning 4 x £2.5k recurring clients = £10k in one month, representing £120k per annum

That £120k pa creates a rough value on exit to the firm of £300k (£120k x 50% margin x 5x EBITDA). Compare this with the first example of £30k revenue only. I know which one I would prefer!

Consulting projects are also trickier to land, often taking a long lead time to close. Prospects might stay in ‘the funnel’ for months, increasing your CAC (customer acquisition cost).

Sales & Marketing is a function that many firms struggle with as it is. Chances are, you’ll have far better processes and pitches for the work you do regularly. Throw in the complexity and nuance of consulting - having to understand clients on a far deeper level just to open an initial conversation with them - and you can see how much more of a time drain making the sale becomes.

Consulting is just more complex than compliance or bookkeeping, from start to finish. It often requires work (and again, skills) that are outside of the industry norm: it’s bespoke and hard to standardise, which means it costs the firm more to do.

In the context of a single, non-recurring fee, you begin to question whether it’s worth it. No matter how big that one-time fee might be. Unless…

Making it worth it: how to convert one-time consulting into long-term advisory

In my experience, whenever a consulting project involves designing a new operating model (in our case, we did a lot of FTOM - finance target operating model - work), you also introduce new processes, new technology, centres of excellence, improved reporting, off-shoring or outsourcing models. 

These are natural follow-ons from a one-off program that then becomes a hybrid model, delivering a far better service than their existing operating model and leading to new recurring revenue. Essentially, you can be the centre of excellence, deliver better reporting every month, or be their outsource provider; you’ve created a place for your firm in the client’s operating model moving forward.

You can even design your consulting offer to usher clients towards a recurring model. flinder’s 5D transformation methodology does this.

_{© 2017 - 2026 flinder / Ascendant}

It doesn’t end at ‘Deploy’. Instead, it offers value past the point of new systems being in place. Supporting clients to ‘Do’ business as usual under new ways of working gives flinder access to a continued seat at the table (and recurring revenue).

I’d maybe go so far as to say that most consulting projects that seem one-off on the surface have the potential to be long-term partnerships. If you’ve deployed good storytelling techniques to evaluate your influence, then clients will buy into the idea that you’re not only the right people to ‘fix’ the immediate problem, but to help them unlock and create more value on an ongoing basis.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with consulting, and nothing inherently risky about one-off fees. But firms can’t actually afford to stall or stand still. Agreeing to too many one-off projects (even at a big-ticket rate of £30k) gets you stuck in an unsustainable, unreliable revenue cycle - where the ‘face’ of your brand is stuck behind the scenes, and not out in the market making sales. And that’s hard to escape from unscathed.

Landing the right mix of recurring and one-off revenue for your firm can take some trial and error. But it’s fundamental to baseline earnings and knowing which profit-generating levers to pull when you want to grow.

flinder was sold in 2024 in what my lawyer called “the fastest transaction ever” - and still, we were two years too late.

Growth was top of mind for us at the time. Selling wasn’t. As co-founders, Luke and I had initially considered raising funds to make our own acquisitions. A plan that, on reflection, wasn’t right for us. 

But even if I’d known right away that selling would be the better route, I now know that for every day that passes between deciding to sell and selling, the firm will lose some value.

If you’ve ever genuinely thought about selling up (and I don’t mean in moments of frustration when you’ve thought ‘I’d rather be on a beach than dealing with this sh*t’), then sell. 

When fresh challenges call, and you’re worried about what the ‘right time’ would be to exit, you’ve already got your answer. Delaying now means less in the bank later. Here’s why.

1. Beware the optimism bias trap

How much further can your firm grow? It’s good to be ambitious with growth goals, but what can you realistically achieve?

I think that owners systematically overestimate the future value of their firms. A firm at £750k revenue, expecting a £10 million exit after 15 years of linear growth, is more than ambitious. It’s delusional (sorry!). This is a real story!

Outdated business models, slow tech adoption, and a lack of the necessary skills the firm of the future needs threaten our industry. I’ll talk about AI more later, but too much is disrupting traditional accounting for firms to rely on future growth potential being actualised as planned. 

Even growth trajectories that are overly ambitious, rather than delusional, can do more harm than good. Optimism bias makes us blind to risk; we think that just because there’s a plan in place, that plan will certainly come to fruition. 

If we’re honest, most firms are already at 80% of where they’ll ever get to - they just don’t know it yet. And the path just gets steeper; every incremental 1% improvement from there is hugely disproportionate in terms of the effort, time, commitment, and capital required. If there was a time to cash out, now’s as good a time as you’ll get.

2. The hidden cost of staying

Not selling carries an opportunity cost, too. 

You’ve got capital tied up in a private, illiquid asset that could be working elsewhere. Then factor in the mental load, the management drag, risk concentration (with 90+% of assets committed to the business)...delaying at this stage only exposes you to more risk and means another day, week, month, or year that you really want to be doing something else, but aren’t.

I’ve heard plenty of leaders say, “We’re not quite ready to sell” - just another year or two, and they’ll be “in the right place”. Sometimes that one/two-year window is designed to increase the firm’s value, so the payout better supports the lifestyle they’re after post-sale. Sometimes it’s designed to help them get their head around the idea of being less involved.

But earn-out periods mean that one/two years become five or six. Most deals involve covenants on your time, restricting the work you can do until that period is over.

Selling is a massive undertaking, sure, but the financial (and personal) case for holding on is rarely as good as it seems. See how that optimism bias trap begins to look more real?

3. The best time to sell is when things couldn’t be better

There’s no greater feeling than building something and having it succeed. As owners, we’ve all been guilty of ‘losing ourselves’ to the job - and that’s no bad thing. It comes from a place of pride and drive. You’ll be hyper-focused and highly motivated during periods of fast growth. But it can also cloud our judgment around selling.

Exiting is a much more appealing prospect when times are tough and you’re feeling less engaged. But by that stage, it’s arguably too late to get the best deal.

Really we should sell when business is strong and on a good trajectory. To do that, though, we have to learn to separate our success from that of the firm, and that’s easier said than done.

4. Even stability = depreciation

Business doesn’t have to be ‘bad’ for the firm to leak value.

A firm is either moving forward or falling behind, harsh as it sounds. Client churn is structural, and new business doesn’t land itself (because referrals are not enough). Staff churn will compound client churn and mean you’ve got less time and resources to focus on growth. 

Every departure means rehiring, retraining, re-relatonship-building - all massive distractions and demands on your energy. You’ll feel like you’re adding value to the firm, but you’re actually just working to get back to where you were. And when the market shifts and multiples change (as they do), all that time you’ve spent recovering has left you with a loss.

5. The disruption clock is ticking

10x isn’t just a bigger version of what you’re doing today. Going from £1 million to £10 million is a fundamentally different business: different model, different leadership, different risk, different opportunities. 

The ‘firm of the future’ could still take many shapes, but I’d challenge you to think about what you’ll be doing in two years to deliver new value. Why? Because time-to-serve, delivery model, and operating model are all shifting simultaneously. And cliché as it sounds, AI is at the centre of transformation. 

Traditional accounting operating models will have less relevance and less value in the market in the near future. Every year you delay an exit is another year of reinvestment in a business model that, at best, just maintains its position.

This goes some way to explain why the AI Exchange is so popular. AI can transform a firm and safeguard its value. It can also be a siren call and a springboard for ambitious owners who now want something different. Disruption is imminent, if not already happening. And it’s up to you whether the firm you’re in today is the right forum for you to explore it.

If you’re looking for a sign…

Firms can pivot and adapt to stay successful - if leaders have the right attitude and appetite for change. But you have to be hungry for the task, and you have to want to stay in the business, feeling excited for what’s ahead. 

An owner who’s already not in the business that much has already checked out, and they aren’t the right person to lead the business forward. In this case, selling is the greatest possible outcome for the owner(s), clients, and the firm as a whole.

Dragging out the decision to sell is a one-way street, deferring pain and deteriorating value.

I can look back now and say that we sold flinder two years too late not because we missed our peak, but more because I’d run out of excitement and energy for the phase the business was in. I’m most engaged in the early stages of a new idea. Like many founders, I’m attracted to the rush (and the risk). 

The bottom line is: if you’re thinking of selling, then sell. That’s the only sign you need.

The ACCA doesn’t teach recruitment. So when accountants start a business, they’re often catapulted into the roles of talent sourcer, talent assessor, interviewer, manager, and more. And with no official guidance to fall back on, it’s time to sink or swim.

I was fortunate to have done a lot (and I mean a lot) of recruitment at PwC. And yet we still made some hiring mistakes in flinder’s early days (we also got it right too, and actually even our first ever hire, Chris, has stayed with the business 8+ years on!). 

On reflection, a lot of the ways we went wrong come down to a lack of resources: lack of cash flow, lack of time.

Given that new businesses rarely have either money or time going spare, I recently sat down with my flinder co-founder, Luke, to discuss what those early years of building the team at flinder taught us and how we’d hire differently today.

Hiring fails we made at flinder (and what they taught me)

1. Hiring too fast and too slow

A business’s early days are all about finding your feet. It’s better to make mistakes quickly and learn from them than never make them at all.

At flinder, we hired both too quickly and too slowly at times. There were hires we rushed because we needed people at all levels, and the skillset we were hiring for wasn’t plentiful in the market at the time (we were very much leading the charge in “finance as a service”). We felt the pressure of client outcomes (we needed people to deliver the work), but it cost us in other ways (we didn’t always hire the people we needed most). 

It’s easy to swing too far in the other direction as well: “I’ve had feedback both ways, including that our recruitment process was too drawn out”, Luke explains. 

Our initial hiring process was overcomplicated on occasion. flinder was growing rapidly, and that places a strain on working capital, so cash flow was tight. 

We thought that having robust guardrails would protect us from making wrong hires, especially at senior levels. The irony is that while assessment centres and ‘meet the team’ days can be beneficial to the candidate and the firm, they can also cost you good (and hard to come by) talent who end up being offered roles elsewhere with fewer steps to complete.

What I would do differently today

As I said before, failing is fine as long as you’re learning. Trial and error, feedback, and introspection led us to a successful hiring structure that continues to be used today:

• Sourcing - Working with a trusted recruiter for referrals or inviting applications.

• Initial assessment - Done via a video task (for cold applicants) or recruiter vetting.

• Skills assessment - Firstly, can they do the job; do they have the experience? flinder had been using Orecor for this, but the platform will soon be sunsetted.

• First interview (on Zoom) - A chance to unpack and further assess their technical skills and experience.

• Final interview - Finally, a focus on culture fit (more on this later), career drive, and a presentation task (a candidate-led presentation up to FC level or case study/board meeting simulation for senior roles - I actually really enjoy playing the role of a challenging client 🤣).

Designing a standard structure is totally under your control as a leader. But cash flow? Less so. Ideally, I’d want the cash flow headroom to hire with intent, and the flexibility not to rush decisions based on an urgent need to get hands on deck.

In some ways, this is at odds with our grow fast philosophy at flinder. But “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”, as they say.

2. Overlooking the value of metrics during probation

There are so many demands on your time and attention in a dynamic, fast-growth business. I’m not thrilled to admit that one or two employee probation periods passed by without me even realising. 

Worse still, probations were pretty ineffectual while the firm was in its infancy. Early on, we didn’t sit down with new hires to set clear objectives for their first 90 days. As Luke put it: “We didn’t really pay any attention to probation. It was almost like, ‘Oh, they’ve taken some pain away from me, they must be good.’”

The way I see it now, probation periods are every bit as essential as the pre-hire stages. They might be more important, actually. Because (and this happened at flinder) someone can do their technical assessments well, interview brilliantly, and still not be the right fit. 

Treat probation as an afterthought, and you miss a vital opportunity to support new hires better or, if needed, to start managing them out.

From an employee’s perspective, a probation that’s lacking structure and feedback is at best unhelpful - and, at worst, misleading: “Gut feel tells you that no news is good news, but that isn’t always the case.”

What I would do differently today

It comes back to process. flinder evolved to operate with mid-probation meetings: new hires are set achievable, measurable goals based on their role.

Conscious of not overcomplicating the process (again!), a positive mid-probation meeting might save time when the probation period ends: either the end-of-probation meeting can be shorter, more focused, or even skipped. But if a new employee’s progress is going off course or not really going at all, that mid-probation check-in is the ideal time to find out why. And there’s an opportunity for both parties to turn it around.

3. We could have placed even more emphasis on behaviour and mindset in our official assessment criteria

Hard skills only get you so far. It’s the soft skills that matter most for mission, vision, values, and competitive advantage.

flinder’s proposition was clear: we wanted to challenge, disrupt, and pioneer. We wanted those qualities in the team too, so we looked for evidence of excellence, entrepreneurialism, tenacity, and authenticity from the applicants we interviewed.

The right traits didn’t have to be there in abundance. They could be subtle and emerging - it then becomes your job as a leader to coax them out. “The people who have done well and continued with [flinder] over time, might not have had it all on day one, but they have it now,” Luke says.

The problem is, soft skills like these can be tricky for candidates to evidence - and harder still for interviewers to evaluate. You can’t tell if someone is over-inflating or straight-up lying at the interview stage. That’s one of the reasons why the probation period carries so much weight!

If Luke and I had got this right initially, then surely we wouldn’t have made any ‘bad’ hires based on poor cultural fit. But we did. So I have to look back and question whether the way we assessed for behaviour and mindset was thorough and deep enough, or whether it was more of a tick-box activity.

What I would do differently today

There’s an element of shared responsibility here. Ideally, candidates should only apply for roles that have a good cultural fit for them (although, in today’s job market, you can’t blame people for letting this criteria slide). The onus is more on us, as leaders, to actively assess candidates against the behaviours and mindsets we want to hire for.

I’d start by asking candidates directly to demonstrate the soft skills I’m after. “Tell me about a time where you…” might be an interview cliche, but it’s used for a reason. 

Again, a good answer could just be the result of really skilled BSing. That’s why I’d add another layer of evidence-gathering. I’d really dig to discover how that behaviour or mindset manifests in their work; does it flow through everything they do? If you’re a person who strives for excellence, that’s not a one-time priority. It’ll be core to your identity as a team member, and you should be able to produce more than one example of “a time where you…?”

What they do outside work can be telling, too. What’s a personal accomplishment they’re proud of and why? Do they invest time in self-development and stretch goals; do they seem curious about the world around them; how do they embody the traits you’re looking for at home as well as at work?

It’s not a leak-proof approach (I’m still learning, too!), but an increased intention and a true focus on hiring for behaviour and mindset should help you avoid wrong cultural fits.

Speaking of curiosity, I’d also add to my list of desired behavioural traits. For me, curiosity is the foundation of improvement - you don’t challenge how something is done today if you’re not curious about how it can be done better.

We don’t always have the luxury of a wealth of choice, but I would like to think that despite someone being technically brilliant, we would be strict about the culture-fit test. If they couldn’t demonstrate how they were going to challenge everything and look for improvement, then they wouldn’t make the cut.

I also confess I probably delegated this to others too quickly!

You’ve made the wrong hire. What now?

“The big point is: when hiring, you do get it wrong,” Luke admits. And I agree. There’ll be times when you need to fix a recruitment mistake after the fact. You’ve hired the wrong person for the job. Or the job spec wasn’t right, and so the person you put in the role can’t drive the business forward.

Again, accountants aren’t trained on how to let someone go. There’s a long list of reasons why we’d put this decision off. Is it sunk cost fallacy? Is it ego? Is it not wanting to be less productive by having one fewer person on the team? Or a mix of all the above?

I know it’s easier said than done, but admitting to a mis-hire and acting on it is the only thing you can do for the good of your firm. In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott talks about “ruinous empathy”: avoiding uncomfortable truths to save someone’s feelings risks a huge negative impact on the team. 

I’ve seen this happen first-hand. Where Luke and I hesitated on letting a mis-hire go, it ended up creating a far worse ripple effect across the team than if we’d moved with urgency. Normally, we held on because of a critical gap in resource level more than anything else. But that’s probably just a weak excuse for not improving a process or system, or even slowing growth (again, “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”).

Ultimately, I think recruitment is something all firms struggle with. Is anyone getting it right, 100% of the time? We’re all following and, at best, incrementally improving on an existing process that’s been known to fail. Maybe we’d benefit from radically redefining the recruitment system by starting again. But I’d be keen to hear your thoughts!

Thanks to Luke Streeter, CEO and co-founder of flinder (and now CEO of Ascendant FaaS), for his contribution to this article.

Missed examples 1 and 2 of these 5 ways to make sales that don’t feel like ‘selling’? I’d recommend you hop back to my previous newsletter and start there. Ideas 1 and 2 are more tactical - they’re something that any firm or firm leader can try right away. This half is more strategic and higher-level - a good challenge to take on!

3. Building community

Humans are communal beings. Our need for social connection dates back across 250 million years of evolution and now, thanks to social media, we are all hyper-connected. 

Here’s why that’s interesting in sales. 

Psychologists have found that the brain is predisposed to sharing ideas with other people. We’re apparently “always on the lookout for who else will find [something] helpful, amusing, or interesting,” explains Matthew Lieberman, author of ‘Social: Why our brains are wired to connect’. (So why not hit the ‘share’ button at the end of this newsletter 😉)

All of this goes some way to explaining why brand-led communities have seen explosive growth. Think official communities like Nike Run Club (over 100 million app users worldwide), as well as unofficial groups like the Reddit thread r/google. 

These networks bring together people with a shared interest - perhaps in a certain sector or a common challenge in their role. Or, if you’re lucky or big enough like Google, that community might develop around your product or service. 

Either way, pitched correctly, a community can attract the right people at the right time (i.e. they are looking for what you offer) and introduce them to your brand. If the community is valuable and meaningful enough, members will invite other members too. The growth is taken out of your hands.

And size doesn’t really matter with community, either. You can build a loyal and highly-engaged following (with real revenue potential) among smaller groups as well.

This is something we’re actively exploring for Numbrs - my latest and boldest venture. 

How communities drive sales

• Communities attract like-minded people, typically facing a similar challenge or chasing a similar opportunity. Pitch it right, and attract your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

• It’s a forum for authentic, organic conversation with prospects and supporters.

• Crucially, communities give you data too. They’re a goldmine for customer insight and a valuable sounding board to sense-check and develop new ideas to take to market.

Great examples from the industry

• Accountancy Cloud’s FoundersX - For the avoidance of doubt, FoundersX advertises itself as ‘a no-agenda community for underrepresented founders’ and brings together startup, scale-up, and VC-backed founders for online and in-person events in London. The community is supported by Accountancy Cloud, but FoundersX feels like a stand-alone product of its own. That’s an important distinction for making a community successful.

4. Strategic partnerships

GoPro and Red Bull target similar but separate audiences. Engagement with one could be a signal of interest in the other, but neither brand runs the risk of stepping on the other’s toes. Plus both brands, while selling different products, embody the same personality traits (daring, adventurous, etc).

Those are the basic ingredients for a winning strategic partnership. 

Several formats are up for grabs here. Affiliate partnerships, distribution/reseller partnerships, technology/platform partnerships, media partnerships, and co-marketing partnerships (like GoPro and Red Bull) all belong in this camp. 

Strategic partnerships worked well for us at flinder. 

For example, we had strategic partnerships with a number of VCs (similar target audiences and different, but complementary, propositions). The agreement was to deliver small packages of work (programmes for their cohorts) that demonstrated value to both the VC and the portfolio company. The partnership helped establish relationships with our ICP, credentialise flinder, and build interest in our business. 

We won some great clients this way, and if I were founding another firm today, this is a sales channel I’d invest much more heavily in.

How strategic partnerships drive sales

• With the right partnership, your firm enjoys the ‘halo effect’ of the other brand’s perceptions. This helps build, improve, or alter your position in the market.

• You gain access to new and/or a higher volume of leads.

• You increase your reach via a new and/or bigger network.

Great examples from the industry

• Ascendant and ICE - Ascendant recently made the smart move of partnering with ICE (community of founders and investors), to gain exposure to the right type of tech clients at the right stage of growth. The ICE Network community has global reach and, as an official partner, Ascendant can ‘borrow’ some of ICE’s positive positioning and goodwill among members, building trust and credibility (and hopefully soon bringing in new leads!)

5. Brand

I’ve written before about brand being a challenging concept for accountants.

A good brand costs good money. A great brand demands money, time, energy, and dedication to build and refine. And the tricky thing is that it’s hard to put a line against ‘brand’ on your P&L. Done right, and your brand will deliver value - even if that value is hard to track.

Here’s one reason I know that to be true.

I used to have a flinder sticker on my laptop. We had them printed as employee ‘swag’, and I hadn’t thought much more of it once it was stuck on. Anyway, one day we get an enquiry out of the blue - the message is from a guy who’d recently sat opposite me on a train, saw the flinder logo on my laptop, and Googled who we were. That fellow train passenger became a client. £8 for 50 stickers and the best CAC I’ve known to date!

How brand drives sales

• Your brand is selling all of the time. It’s the way that new leads make sense of what you do, how you do it, and what you might be like to work with. It’s pitching on your behalf when you’re not around.

• Brand is embedded in your service delivery to drive client satisfaction (and referrals).

• People buy from brands they feel a part of; position your client as the hero of your brand story to build resonance, engagement, and sales. 

Great examples from the industry

• Can I say flinder again? - Seriously, not only am I proud of the brand we built for flinder, but we know that it’s been successful. The brand came up in conversation with potential hires, with potential investors, and turned a simple train journey into a sale. And from being on the ground at the time, I know how influential it was in creating a culture that employees and clients alike all wanted to be a part of.

And for when you do need to ‘do sales’...

Prospecting is an area in which AI really thrives.

There’s now a vast choice of AI and AI-powered Sales tools out there, many (like Clay) leveraging data to help you focus your efforts. 

Sales automation has changed the game, too. Workflows on platforms like n8n (see inspiration here) mean you can run research, prospecting, and follow-ups pretty much on autopilot once it’s all set up. So you don’t have to cold call anyone anymore, unless you still really want to.

How do you feel about ‘Sales’?

I’m sure that many accountants would admit they aren’t the most natural salespeople. Our bunch can shy away from selling their firms - and downright avoid selling themselves.

Plus with so many new business leads coming from referrals (close to 90%, according to the accounting leaders I asked), it’s easy to pretend that you don’t need outbound sales activities.

But as I’ve stressed before, referrals can’t (or shouldn’t) make up your entire new business strategy.

The good news for accountants? Selling doesn’t always have to feel like ‘Sales’.

5 sales tactics for accountants who don’t like Sales

The definition of a tactic is a specific step towards achieving a broader strategic goal. 

Picking up the phone and cold calling a prospect can be a Sales tactic. But it’s not the only one that works. 

Here’s what else you can do to proactively generate leads, nurture opportunities, and convert sales (while referrals come in in the background).

1. SEO/GEO

The basic purpose of search engine optimisation (SEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO) is to get your firm in front of the right people when they need your service(s). You want your firm to appear in the first few results for any search term or phrase that speaks to what you do. 

GEO is a newer initiative aimed at making it easy for AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to cite your company’s content (ChatGPT now handles around 12% of Google’s search volume and more daily searches than Bing!).

Many of the same strategies work for SEO and GEO. Topic clusters (e.g. ‘e-commerce KPIs’), Q&A formats, and ‘Best of…’ lists are known to perform well and bring in leads. But it’s also important to look under the hood of your website: how’s your loading speed, is your HTML code clean? ‘Technical’ SEO/GEO plays an important role too, and no amount of time spent producing great content will pay off if bots can’t crawl your website.

There are lots of great resources to learn about SEO/GEO online (like Moz). Or you can commission a specialist agency or contractor to do it on your behalf.

How SEO/GEO drives sales

• Great, strategic content positions your brand as a voice of authority (a business that prospects trust and want to work with).

• It gets eyes on your firm and ‘sells’ on your behalf. A well-designed content funnel will nurture interested leads from the early stages of considering your firm, right through to becoming a client (24/7!).

Great examples from the industry

• flinder - flinder retains some high-ranking keywords, appearing in search results just below the relevant tech vendors for phrases like ‘unleashed implementation’,  ‘approvalmax implementation’, and even ecom-focused ‘what is contribution margin’ (Google it and see!). This didn’t happen overnight, and our main phrases were hard to rank for initially. But we produced scorecards and other lead magnets that spoke directly to our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of growing ecom brands. Plus, the website performs very well on technical SEO (thanks to the team at Braeface 👏).

2. Social selling

Okay, this one can feel a bit like ‘Sales’. It takes some guts to hit ‘Start a Post’ on LinkedIn, especially if you’re new to posting and you know you need to promote yourself.

But being active on social is about more than writing new posts for yourself or the firm. You can get pretty far with commenting on other people’s content, reposting articles with your thoughts, and even joining groups (although I will say there are plenty of bots and fake accounts lurking around LinkedIn groups. Head to Reddit if it’s communities you want to join).

The algorithm is also a fickle beast. You’ll need to experiment with content formats and posting times. 

Individual profiles (i.e. yours) will outperform a company profile (i.e. the firm’s) the majority of the time. That’s always been the case for me. LinkedIn has won us business, but from personal connections among the team.

How social selling drives sales

• The more active you are on LinkedIn, the more impressions your content will get, and the more people (and potential leads) will learn about what you do.

• LinkedIn is a place to present your personal brand, and people want to work with people.

• Promotional posts typically perform less well than insightful, informative, or entertaining content - so don’t stress about actively ‘selling’, just write what interests you and will interest your ICP too.

Great examples from the industry

• Laura Taylor, accounting founder and business mentor - I spoke to Laura recently about how she grew her LinkedIn network to over 65,000 followers and how she’s monetised her time investment in social. She told me that too many firms push the “We’re delighted to announce…” and “An update from our team…” messages, where true value lies in writing posts as if you’re speaking directly to an ideal client: share a thought, reveal an insight, tell a story. This, plus personal storytelling/showing the team behind the brand and impactful promotional posts (like testimonials and social proof), at a ratio of 70% value-adds, 20% personal stories, and 10% promo posts, has helped Laura trace more than £3 million in revenue to LinkedIn.

A bonus example that I love

Both the above ideas have content at their centre. 

You need strong content to put on your website to drive SEO. And you need strong content to share on socials and spin out into posts. ‘Strong’ content is content that’s written for your ICP. One of my favourite examples comes from Wow, and their BenchPress reports aimed at UK agencies.

Why the BenchPress reports work so well for me is that they give a huge amount of value to Wow’s ICP. The reports are free to download (behind a contact form), but a few contact details really do feel like a fair exchange when the content is so tailored for you.

PwC did something similar during my time there with the Finance Function Benchmark Report. PwC’s report was used as a pillar piece of content and naturally led on to ‘smaller’, more focused benchmark services. Together, this then led to huge transformation projects in the areas that lagged. We also ran a well-attended flagship event called the Finance Leaders Summit (something I ran for 2 years when I was there).

All of this to say that small and short-term ‘sales’ tactics can inspire communities, forge new partnerships, and really build your brand.

And those are what we’ll look at in part 2, next Saturday at 8.15am.

Our first hire at flinder wasn’t an accountant. 

Yes, they had an accounting background from PwC but he specialised in data (Chris Agnew, who is still part of the team over eight years later).

This was no accident. Bringing data analysis and data reporting in-house was crucial for flinder from its early days. It was a pretty radical concept at the time - maybe not so much now, although I still think that flinder’s use of operational data in storytelling is second to none.

Luke and I had the vision of building an insight-focused business: one that better served fast-growth tech companies by harnessing financial and operational data. Hiring a data lead straight out of the gates signalled our conviction; it showed the market that we believed in the value of our offer. And, on a practical level, it meant we had the skillset in-house to really deliver!

Filling seats with practising accountants could work for traditional firms. But for firms with unique offers or disruptive tech-led services, the ‘hiring strategy’ is just that - it’s got to be strategic.

You have to be bold to be better

You might have read my previous newsletter, ‘Okay, you’ve built a firm. But did you build a business?’. 

In it, I share how I asked accounting leaders what sort of firm they’d build if they started again tomorrow. The group was divided, and we had a healthy - and ultimately inconclusive - debate around the ‘firm of the future’ and how best to serve clients.

And that’s good news, because it means there’s enough opportunity to go around. There’s no ‘one’ proposition that all firms should focus on.

As accountants, we tend to like black and white.

Entrepreneurs embrace the grey. They lead with curiosity, take measured risks, and fail in order to improve. This is a mindset that some people are simply born with - but that others can learn. Of the accounting leaders I know who are developing the most innovative solutions in our space, they aren’t trained in AI, and they haven’t done an MBA. They’re great accountants with both the lack of ego and the boldness to say, “I don’t think we’ve been doing this in the best way”.

That vision for a better firm (whatever ‘better’ looks like to your firm: more boutique, for niche sectors, AI-led, or otherwise) is what gets them going. It’s what helps them focus on what to do next and who to hire first.

When we’re dedicated to building ‘better’, we’re almost never building ‘the same’. That’s why we didn’t bring on another accountant as flinder’s first hire. Luke and I had those skills covered. We recruited to bridge the gap between what we thought better looked like and how we’d take that vision to market.

Firms can hire for more of the same skills and build a highly capable team of accountants. These accountants can be at the top of their game and valuable to a long list of clients. But eventually you’ll reach a ceiling, maxing out your opportunities to improve. And when the firm has never thought much about its vision for the future, that’s when growth will stall.

I guess what I’m saying is, don’t be afraid to be different. Take a contrarian position if that’s what excites you. Then surround yourself with people who buy into that vision too, and have the skills to help you achieve it.

Hiring to fulfil your vision

Let’s take this back to practicalities for a moment and compare two (probable) hiring strategies of two restaurants: McDonald’s and Gymkhana.

Gymkhana has two Michelin stars. To get a two-star rating, Michelin inspectors have to feel the restaurant team’s personalities coming through in the food. Gymkhana’s chefs must be creative, distinctive, inspiring - and bring something new.

If you’ve seen the film The Founder, on the other hand, then you’ll have seen how the McDonald’s production-line process was supposedly developed. McDonald’s staff follow a standardised, regimented workflow and never meant to deviate from the plan.

Both are highly successful strategies for highly successful propositions, but their visions couldn’t be further apart. And the skills you’d hire to execute at McDonald’s aren’t the same skills you’d hire to keep Gymkhana operating at its level.

That’s the logic I’d apply when hiring for modern firms, too: not every accountant is right for every accounting firm. And, actually, the right hire for an accounting firm might not be an accountant at all.

flinder’s seventh full-time hire was a video editor, for example - a role that we opened up to invest in the brand and get a head start on owned content before other firms got there first.

I’m not saying we never hired accountants, because we did. Offshoring was core to the operating model as well. Offshore teams filled gaps in our capacity. Strategic in-house hires filled gaps in our capability.

It’s easy to fall into the cycle of winning new clients and hiring more accountants: rinse and repeat. The risk is that can lead to overstaffing and operational inefficiency. It can also lead to the tail wagging the dog: hiring for the skills that immediate client work requires, rather than the skills your firm needs to deliver on its vision.

If I were building a firm again today, I might wait to win new clients, then use AI (and/or offshoring) to fulfil a majority of the work. As for the skill gaps I’d recruit for, I might well consider hiring engineers as system designers for the firm instead.

Is AI a gap that all firms need to address?

We know there are several skills that firms now need in-house as ideal customer profiles (ICPs) evolve. Empathy, commerciality, data literacy, and digital fluency (including AI) probably top the list. 

The makeup of a firm should be dictated by its vision: how you want to differentiate yourself and how to deliver what’s demanded by your ICP. Sometimes that means turning down work or firing clients so that you stay true to strategy. Both of which we did at flinder.

As firm leaders, we’re being challenged to plan the trajectory of our firms. It’s not enough to leave growth up to chance and hiring down to what’s been done in the past.

There’s space in the market for a range of propositions to succeed. But my money is on the firms building new, improved, and differentiated offers, hiring a new breed of in-house talent, and following a clearly defined AI strategy to ensure RoI.

Those of us who’ve been in the industry long enough have witnessed timesheets fall in and out of favour.

Timesheets were once seen as the go-to method for billing clients. But times change (thankfully!). What’s heralded as best practice one day can later end up feeling dated. I’ve felt that way about timesheets as a billing tool for years, and maybe you feel the same.

Timesheets were never (or only in very specific circumstances) used to bill clients at flinder. Mostly because billing by timesheets is working capital inefficient and flinder’s pricing model was built on subscription to keep us working capital favourable.

We did use timesheets at flinder, though. And found them to be highly strategic.

For us, timesheets were a way of gathering critical business data. They signalled how efficiently we were working, whether our products and services were priced correctly, if the team had specific training needs, and more.

Sure, you can gather similar insights anecdotally. But fast-growth, high-performance businesses all have one thing in common: they track and analyse quantitative data to optimise and move forward. They build a culture around data (become “data obsessed” as we called it at flinder), so that the organisation captures data in real time as much as possible, rather than after the fact.

Alex Bond Burnett, Academy Manager at Cowry Consulting, once told me that a firm is “the guardian” of the data that tells a client “the reality of what’s happening in their business [...] They’re in the thick of it. They need you to be able to help pull them out and see the landscape as it is.”

The same is true of timesheet data internally in the firm. Even the most senior staff can get too bogged down in the day-to-day (and their view of it) to see the bigger picture. Data tells the true story.

flinder proved that timesheets have a very valid place in the modern accounting firm - as a tool for operational improvement.

Highlighting hidden truths and why that’s valuable

Timesheet data can reveal (otherwise unknown) issues in a firm, and shape the business case for solving them.

For example:

• Employees logging too many hours - This could signal a burnout risk and/or a dynamic in the team where certain individuals are taking on too much. With employee experience and wellbeing such essential drivers of productivity and performance, getting the workload balance right is key for long-term success.
  

• Employees logging too few hours - This could signal a disengagement risk and lead to employee churn. Losing a team member has a direct financial and operational impact on the firm, as well as putting immediate pressure on the rest of the team.
  

• Processes that take longer than expected - If certain tasks are a time drain, why? And how can that be resolved? The process may be ripe for improvement, or there may be a training need within the team to build confidence or capability. Either way, inefficiency costs the firm time and money and should be resolved asap.
  

• Processes with too many team members involved - Manual or repetitive processes are the perfect use case for AI, RPA, or other tech intervention. Keep a human-in-the-loop for quality assurance, but you can certainly improve the efficiency of workflows (and the client and employee experience) with the right technology plugged in.
  

• Accounts the team spends a disproportionate amount of time on - Timesheet data gives hard evidence of a mismatch between clients’ agreed fees and the time they demand. This evidence can then be used to start a conversation with a client, increasing their fee or changing the scope of the work to better protect your margin.
  

• Client sectors the firm spends a disproportionate amount of time on - The same can be said for client sectors as a whole. At flinder, we found that our two target industries (tech and ecom) should be charged differently. ecom clients - and their cost accounting/inventory management - were more hands-on; the margin was too pinched until the basic fee was revised.

Two metrics we tracked at flinder to add context to timesheet data: utilisation and realisation.

Utilisation referred to how much of a team member’s time was spent on client work versus non-client work. Client work is obviously (notionally) chargeable (although we separated the actual time spent on each client from their fee - that’s the old model of timesheet data). We’d want the majority of the team’s time to be chargeable (or rather client-focused), although some non-client work is always essential.

Realisation referred to how much time had been spent on each client versus the subscription fee they paid. We’d investigate any case where the time spent was too high and the margin too thin, drawing up an action plan either internally and/or with the client.

From just these examples above, it’s clear how timesheet data can be leveraged for improvements in all aspects of the business. With it, you can track return on investment for new projects and initiatives. You don’t have to settle for anecdotal feedback. You can quantify in black and white whether the changes made move you in the right direction.

I can’t stress enough how essential real-time (or near enough to real-time) data and data analysis are when running a performance business.

Getting data quality and quantity

High-quality data is needed to surface these insights. The more time that elapses between the task and the timesheet, the lower the data quality gets; real-time data is the best way to keep your finger on the pulse.

If someone does a timesheet every day at 5pm, that’s the best quality. If they complete a timesheet for the week on a Friday afternoon, it’s of workable quality. If they wait until the Monday, that’s lower quality still. And if they put off filling in their timesheet until 2 weeks later, then (let’s be honest) that data is made up.

We tried to remove as much friction as possible from flinder’s timesheet process. We didn’t ask that every 6 or 15 minutes be allocated to a client. We trusted the team to track sensible proportions of their time - tight enough time windows for the data to be directional, without the ask becoming so much that people just rejected it.

Even with this level of flexibility, there’s a behavioural challenge to overcome - especially when (re)introducing timesheets to a firm. I won’t say that we had everyone filling in their timesheets at 5pm every day. We definitely had some stragglers! 

Aim to have 100% of the team accurately tracking 80+% of their time. Anything less and you’ll find the gaps in your data invalidate the data as a whole.

Why not settle for retrospective reviews?

‘Rosy retrospection’ is a well-studied cognitive bias. It’s a bit like nostalgia, where we all share the human trait of rating past events too positively. 

Rose-tinted glasses aside, there’s a list of other reasons why real-time data capture always wins out. And they pretty much all come down to the brain’s limitations. Negative autobiographical memories decay faster than positive ones (e.g. looking back, you might misremember how complex a task was and underestimate the time it took you). 

All of this to say, an end-of-project or end-of-quarter review meeting simply isn’t the right forum to capture productivity data - not if you want to use the insights to improve your operations. 

Communicating the value of this data

It’s worth emphasising the reason why we gather and analyse this data.

This newsletter isn’t in defence of micromanagement. And timesheet data shouldn’t be weaponised or used as a sole indication of the team’s performance, beyond where they may need further support.

These distinctions matter when rolling timesheets out; getting the team’s buy-in is a lot about how you position the ask.

It helps if you’ve hired people who naturally understand the value of data, like we had at flinder. That way it won’t be a leap for them to see how the data can be used to charge clients appropriately (and how advantageous that can be for them in terms of pay and diversity of/fulfillment from their work). 

Leaders leading by example is essential too. Not only do I mean filling in timesheets for yourself (yes, that’s needed to get the full picture of the firm!). I also mean intentionally building and talking about building the firm as a business.

Growing businesses need operational data. Timesheets give you some of that data. It’s as simple as that.

If you’re getting pushback or think you might get pushback from the team, there’s likely a cultural change that needs to happen first to make the exercise worthwhile.

But if you’re building a data-first culture internally, then timesheets shouldn’t be too foreign or disruptive a concept for teams. You’ll be able to gather thorough enough and timely enough timesheet data to understand what’s really going on in the firm and improve operations from there.

It’s a tale as old as time: leaders, especially in small and/or scaling firms, end up being pulled into too many activities and spend more time ‘in’ the business than ‘on’ it.

This has obvious and immediate drawbacks, not least of all where leaders’ wellbeing is concerned. In our pursuit of being a performance-focused business, both Luke and I had to continually up our game - we had to be honest about where our time was best spent.

Leaders who spend too much of their time driving day-to-day value can’t drive business value. Time spent organising meetings, booking travel, other routine activities, and delivering basic services is time not spent on strategic planning, reinforcing culture, business development, or building the brand.

This is a widely accepted fact. So why do leaders still delegate less than they should?

Part of the challenge lies in defining exactly what can be delegated and who should take it on. For that, I’ve got a great matrix that more than proved its value at flinder, and I’ll share it with you now…

How to focus your efforts and delegate better: the matrix we used at flinder

This matrix maps tasks from internal to client-facing and operational to strategic.

Generally speaking, we used these quadrants to identify groups of activities which could be moved to different roles, whether we had them in the business already or not. Interestingly, we applied a similar strategy for activities in the front-office FinOps team for whether they should sit onshore / offshore, with a CFO or a Manager, etc.

For this particular exercise and set of axes:

• Internal operational tasks could be the responsibility of an admin or PA role (bottom left)

• Internal strategic tasks might fall to a practice management or Operations Director role (bottom right)

• Client-facing operational tasks could be passed to a Manager or CFO (top left)

• Client-facing strategic tasks would likely stay with a partner (top right)

Plotting ‘Strategic’: High to low

Is the task operational or strategic in nature? Does it have an immediate or short-term focus with practical outputs? Or is it working toward a longer-term organisational goal?

Plotting ‘Client-facing’: High to low

Identifying to what degree a task is client-facing isn’t a good enough delegation criterion on its own - Ops and Support roles can usually be client-facing if needed. But once you layer on the strategic vs operational lens, then it becomes much clearer whether a partner or founder should stay actively involved.

This grid was something Luke and I returned to time and time again when building flinder. Over time, all roles pick up activities they probably shouldn’t be doing, so it’s a good exercise to regularly work through to get back to the core of what’s relevant and most appropriate for that senior role.

We made a list of all the activities that took up our time on a weekly or monthly basis. And I mean everything, from checking email to running payroll to booking meeting rooms and employee performance feedback. For this exercise to be valuable, all activities must be reviewed - not just the activities you already want to delegate. This will limit your thinking and cause too much bias to slip through unnoticed.

Why use a matrix? Why not go with gut-feel?

There are several reasons why this delegation framework has value.

For one, we’re much more likely to commit to delegating a task once we’ve seen the rationale in black and white. It’s called ‘encoding’, where what we see is delivered to the hippocampus and stored in long-term memory. And when we fill in that matrix for ourselves, the ‘generation effect’ is at play, too - we remember material we’ve generated better than material we’ve read.

A completed matrix is also something you - and others - can hold yourself accountable to. If you start getting pulled back into operational or internal tasks (it always happens), you’ve got the language to interject. For firm leaders, this will probably be a conversation with ourselves; you might open an email or see a meeting request and before you spend any unnecessary time, you can remind yourself: “This is a job for Ops”.

And as far as gut-feel goes, it can’t always be trusted. We are human and fallible. We are irrational and biased, as I referenced above. We sometimes even like the more practical and internal tasks of running the firm. We might hold on to our involvement with them even when it’s illogical. 

Leaders in an accounting firm are perhaps even more susceptible to this as we were trained to be accountants - not business leaders. Sometimes it’s within the accounting processes that we feel most comfortable.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it will limit your firm’s potential for growth.

Other decision-making matrices that drive value

2x2 matrices are found everywhere in business (you can’t escape them somewhere like The Big 4, take it from me!)

The 2x2 format can be lifted to help make sense of a wide range of inputs, but here are two other matrix grids that can help a firm be more strategic.

The Eisenhower matrix (for prioritisation)

Last week I wrote about strategy and knowing why you’re setting tasks. This matrix is for when you need to organise that task list by what gets done first.

Important and urgent tasks should take priority. Important but not urgent tasks should be scheduled for next.

Urgent but unimportant tasks can be delegated (see your delegation matrix to determine who takes them on). Unimportant and not urgent tasks can be deleted for now.

The stakeholder management matrix

There are various iterations of the stakeholder management matrix. 

Personally, I like the below as this feeds into a stakeholder heat mapping exercise I like to use as part of an Account Planning Workshop.

4 delegation matrix watch-outs

I’m not exaggerating when I say that the various uses of this matrix transformed my time at flinder. But, like all strategic frameworks, it isn’t a silver bullet - there’s a good, better, and best way of integrating the findings into the firm.

1. For one, matrices like these are simplified versions of reality. It can be hard to codify aspects of your work neatly into one box. What makes sense in theory can be different in practice.

2. It’s not a “set and forget” process either. Once a task has been delegated, it’ll need monitoring and reviewing. Out of the to-do list shouldn’t mean out of mind. Keep a dialogue open with the team and be aware of changes to client experience or satisfaction and service delivery, and adjust the matrix accordingly.

3. When collaborating with others on a matrix, keep that group small. This helps navigate and limit the subjectivity inherent in exercises like these.

4. Lastly, be clear with your delegation. At flinder we had thorough processes and shared definitions of a project owner’s responsibilities. These linked back to our OKRs (see last week’s newsletter) and ensured that even when the firm’s leaders had delegated a task, we still had visibility.

The training app, Runna, has seen phenomenal growth since its launch in 2022 and was acquired by Strava last year. There are several reasons for Runna’s success, but the simplest reason is that it works. 1+ million beginner, intermediate, and advanced runners use the “game-changing” personalised running coach today.

If you’ve ever set yourself a physical challenge - running, cycling, walking, losing weight, etc - then you’ll know first-hand how intimidating the end goal can feel. When you’re just scraping through a 5k, the idea of doing it 4+ times over without stopping might be a distant dream. But breaking that end goal down into smaller, more achievable and measurable objectives makes the process feel more manageable. 

I’ve worked with a personal trainer for many years, and we always work in 3-month mesocycle blocks to make sure we’re focused on the goals we’re looking to achieve.

This is what apps like Runna help users do. In essence, the training plan uses OKRs to ensure that runners cross their finish line. 

OKR is an acronym for Objectives and Key Results:

• An ‘Objective’ is the ‘what’ - The outcome that’s intended, i.e. run a half-marathon

• A ‘Key Result’ is the ‘how’ - The method being used to achieve that objective, i.e., run twice a week for 12 weeks, mixing short and tempo workouts with progressive long runs. Runna even encourages users to sign up to ‘B-races’ — shorter, intermediate events that are built into longer training plans to work up to the ‘A race’ (the one you’re really aiming for).

But this isn’t an article about running plans (I actually prefer cycling these days).

Side note: a few of us run an accounting cycling group if you’re interested in joining. It’s roughly 80km @ 25kph each month. Hit ‘Reply’ on this email for more info.

OKRs have been deployed successfully in companies like Google, Amazon, and, of course, flinder. In an organisational setting, OKRs break up bigger goals into measurable, achievable outcomes. They limit the scope of the work in terms of deliverables and deadline. They add a layer of accountability to develop an ongoing dialogue with the team. And they are an excellent way to successfully execute your strategy.

In the book (and OKR bible) Measure What Matters, John Doerr credits OKRs with creating four main “superpowers”: focus and commitment to priorities, aligning and connecting teams, tracking accountability, and stretching the business’s limits.

Having used OKRs to grow flinder, I can attest to all of the above benefits being true.

I can also appreciate how foreign the concept of OKRs might feel to accounting leaders. A few weeks ago my newsletter Okay, you’ve built a firm. But did you build a business? had my highest open rate to date. The question clearly resonated with all of you, probably because most firms are guilty of putting strategy on the back seat.

Working with OKRs is one way for firms to be more intentional and strategic. 

In fact, OKRs are meaningless (and purposeless) without a strategic foundation. So let’s start there.

What’s your firm’s strategy?

Many outcomes happen unintentionally in the traditional accounting firm.

Two examples of this that I’ve shared in previous newsletters:

• Accountants typically start their business based on the skills they have themselves. They don’t test the market to discover if these are the skills their audience values most. So when the business is doing well, they may not necessarily know why (I call this unconsciously competent). And when business is slow, they may not have the customer insight to know what to change.
  

• Referrals are still the majority source of new business. 85+% of the finance leaders at Finance Takes The Piste 2025 ranked referrals as their top source of new clients, while outbound sales unanimously fell in the least successful sources (ranked 4-7 out of 7). Firms have become too reliant on referrals coming to them. They’re failing to set a growth strategy and take ownership of their pipeline.

‘Strategy’ is one of those words that has a hundred possible meanings. For me, a firm’s strategy can be defined by a clear mission and vision - something that has commercial potential (i.e. your Ideal Customer Profile/ICP wants it) and that can be translated down to OKRs to keep you organised, focused, and accountable.

flinder’s strategy was focused on rapid growth, and so we needed good visibility and data on the sales pipeline.

So a typical OKR worked example could have been:

And if I deep-dive on one of these key results to illustrate some activities that become more actionable, we would have:

KR2. Standardised deal stages and probability scoring implemented across the pipeline.

And again, if I deep-dive on one of these actions, an example structure for defining pipeline stages would be as follows:

As I said above, an OKR has no context without strategy. You might be setting measurable objectives and have something to keep teams accountable to, but why exactly? What’s the bigger picture of what you’re trying to achieve? 

If those questions can’t be answered, the firm has a gap in its strategy (or, worse, no strategy at all). That’s where to focus first before using OKRs.

How to define an OKR

So you have a clear strategy and you can set some clear objectives, but how do you know if they meet the OKR criteria?

• Is the objective ambitious but attainable? OKRs set limits on scope and timeline, but they shouldn’t limit your ambition. It’s good to set objectives that stretch and challenge the firm, and it’s okay if you don’t achieve them 100%. Even hitting 70% is a huge win and probably gets you further ahead in the immediate term than if you’d set no goals at all or goals with too broad a scope.
  

• Is the objective meaningful and aligned to your overall strategic goal(s)? At flinder we saw that OKRs can make change happen quickly. But you want to ensure that change is moving you in the right direction. If an objective doesn’t make total sense in the context of your organisational strategy, start again.
  

• Can you list several time-bound and measurable results that will make the objective possible? The whole point of OKRs is to drive rapid execution. Identifying incremental milestones along the journey to achieving the long-term objective helps  make sure you never “set and forget” your goals. 30, 60, or 90-day timeframes give plenty of opportunity for progress, while building in ‘stop and think’ stages to optimise and adapt. You want people to win with OKRs; achieving Key Results motivates the teams and helps avoid strategy fatigue.
  

• Have you/can you share the OKRs with the team? Transparency is key with OKRs. At flinder we shared OKRs with the entire organisation so that everyone was aware of who was working on what and why. At the very least, assign a clear owner to each OKR. This owner is responsible for reporting on an OKR’s progress so you can respond as required.

The lifecycle of an OKR

John Doerr’s book Measure What Matters outlines three phases of an OKR.

1. The setup

Creating the right environment for successful OKRs involves more than just filling out the framework.

OKRs are collaborative and cultural. For them to work, everyone needs to be bought into the idea of defining and monitoring progress in the same way. “Yes, there will be late adopters, resisters, and garden-variety procrastinators”, Doerr warns. And for this, he suggests “OKR shepherds” - one or more people tasked with driving adoption (and herding the flock).  

This task would naturally fall to a firm’s leaders, but as the newsletter will look at next week, there’s a good chance that this can be delegated over time.

2. Midlife tracking

“Regular check-ins - preferably weekly - are essential to prevent slippage”. But tracking OKRs does more than highlight issues. It provides the team with an opportunity to adapt, expand, or close an OKR down.

Doerr recommends a four-point status review:

• Continue - If the goal isn’t broken and everything is progressing as expected.

• Update - If things are slipping, why? And how can we respond?

• Start - New OKRs can be launched whenever the need arises.

• Stop - An OKR can be dropped once it's outlived its usefulness.

At flinder we built on this with three statuses:

• Green - Project is on track to meet its objective(s).

• Amber - I am expecting delays that may affect the project delivery date or its output.

• Red - I have fallen behind and the project likely won’t be delivered on time or to the required standard.

3. Rinse and repeat

To repeat a point from above, reaching 70% of an OKR can mean significant progress made. And failure to deliver even some of an OKR’s scope can unlock useful data and insight.

“Tremendous value can be gained from post hoc evaluation and analysis” of OKRs, and you want your OKR reviews to be “retrospective and forward-thinking at the same time”. OKRs that are incomplete can be rolled over, new OKRs can be set using updated criteria based on what’s been learned, and success can be celebrated to motivate the team.

Make your goals smaller to actually achieve more

OKRs enabled rapid growth at flinder, and I’m a huge advocate of this way of thinking. 

Culturally, Luke and I were obsessed with strategy, execution, and measurable outcomes - so we built a business and hired a team with the same values in mind. For other firms, adopting OKRs could feel like a leap; a new language and a new approach that takes time to get right.

The benefits far outweigh the learning curve though, if you ask me. 

After all, it’s arrogant and naive to think that any of us know what will be happening in the world in 3-5 years’ time. OKRs offer a more adaptable, agile method.

This newsletter has touched a lot on the evolving role of accountants, including what happens when accountants become product innovators. But are these accountants-turned-product-owners just outliers - or is this part of a wider trend? 

Clearly we’re not there yet, but I truly believe that AI has the potential to disrupt our industry for the better.

Meaningful AI strategies will fundamentally change a firm’s service delivery (at some point in the future). I’m hopeful this will enable us to deliver a more human and relationship-led experience for business owners.

And, in a way, that also means the basic role of an accountant will shift from an operator (executing tasks) to a system designer role (building tech-led systems). Systems have always been key to accounting. But where traditional systems have been designed to be hybrid offline/online, our industry is transforming to become digital-first. To a certain extent, we’re system designers already, but some of those systems we’re designing are offline as well as online.

This is largely true whether firms decide to buy or build their AI solutions. Which route they take comes down to their current AI appetite; whether they see enough future value in AI to invest in talent behind it. 

It will soon(ish) be possible for a firm to expand its AI applications from admin-focused to more transformative use cases. AI for admin gives us a good foundation to grow from, helping firms work more efficiently and effectively without deep working knowledge of AI. But a firm that wants to build its own solutions will almost certainly need a team in-house with at least advanced low/no-code capabilities.

What does this mean for how we hire and train teams? Will firms need as many accountants in-house? What skills will these accountants need?

And, ultimately, would that shift be a good thing for the future of accountancy - or does it mean that for many people, their time in the industry is up?

Just how much is the accounting profession changing?

Last week I shared a stat from Accountancy Age: 70% of firms are apparently using AI, embedding it into workflows to “boost productivity and client service”.

Knowing exactly how, or what for, would give us a clearer picture. I don’t disagree that many firms are experimenting with AI to make admin more efficient. But I reckon there are far fewer firms using AI in truly disruptive ways, such as creating new propositions and finding better ways to serve their client base. 

Where firms are led by people with a genuine passion for AI, we’re seeing faster - more exciting - change. These leaders are doing their research, they’re investing time and money in AI, they’re creating a culture of AI-curiousity within the firm, where people can try, fail, and learn together. They’re in the top 1% of AI users in accounting today. They’re also normally the leaders we get around the table at an AI Exchange dinner!

What comes next for these firms will be interesting to observe. 

As they put more energy behind AI innovation, how will their firm change shape?

Their talent strategy will change, for sure. 46% of leaders expect many of the core accounting skills to “become less relevant”. At our last AIX meet-up, one person explained how they’re prioritising the skillset to interpret challenges and build systems that solve them.

Another person shared how AI development might become a core accounting skill in the future, even in firms that buy their tech:

This is where firms need to choose a direction of travel. Will they hire to ‘buy’ and deploy existing platforms or ‘build’ their own, and how does that strategy play out over the years?

Building vs buying: how can firms create a point of difference in their AI strategy?

Competitive advantage could come from buying, building, or both.

Where does differentiation come from anyway? Firms are largely supported by the same technology today (Xero, DEXT, Silverfin, Fathom, etc.). Competitive advantage can come from brand, experience, relationships, value-adds, or price. You don’t want to end up competing on price alone if you can help it, although many do.

So when it comes to AI, what makes a firm stand out more: is it the design of the AI-powered system itself (builders) or how a system is used (buyers)?

Buying gives you access to the same features as many other firms. More innovative users can stitch existing platforms together in novel ways to unlock added value: their connected stack and how it’s deployed becomes the point of difference. And still, when a service model is based around features that any firm can access, it can get lost in a sea of sameness. It might even force firms to fall back on race-to-the-bottom pricing.

On the other hand, firms that choose to design new systems could suffer from ‘shiny object’ syndrome. Over-investment in AI (and hiring people trained to excel in it) could lead them to take their eye off the ball and under-value the core, foundational qualities that our industry was built on. How relevant their brand is to their audience, how strong their client relationships are, and how well they meet and anticipate client needs could all start to suffer.

Let’s break it down, head-to-head.

AIX: January 2026 dinner

Why ‘build’?

Developing rich AI capabilities in-house means that firms can be proactive in problem-solving. They can design systems for new products and services from scratch to create a point of difference. Crucially, they also own these products and services. They’re not subject to price changes. They can even take them to market.

There’s a lot of revenue potential in this route if a firm does it right. 

For leaders who are bored or frustrated with traditional accounting, this route is an appealing alternative too. It might even be the way the industry is headed, whether firms like it or not. They’re just adapting sooner.

Most people around the table at January’s AIX agreed that, yes, within five years, they’d need at least one developer in-house focusing on AI. What proportion of the team will be hired to manage AI versus traditional accounting roles is still up for debate.

Why ‘buy’?

There’s an argument to be made about leaving AI innovation to vendors. After all, these businesses have billion or multi-billion-pound budgets to put into AI, and firms definitely don’t. But do they really understand what we need or want?

Buying is a lower-risk approach and requires less strategic change. Plus, as I mentioned above, innovation can come from orchestration as well as software creation. Sure, other firms might be using the same off-the-shelf solutions as you are, but can you patch them together in unique ways (and save on development costs)?

Finding a middle ground

Can firms do a bit of both for now? 

Low and no-code AI platforms have a low point of entry. These tools are simple enough for most accountants to pick up and develop hard skills around (no software qualifications required). 

Then we just have to worry about the soft skills: hiring and training the right mindset (innovative, inquisitive, enterprising).

Is that easier said than done though?

How will firms find, hire, and afford system designers?

A new breed of accountant impacts talent plans.

I mentioned above that ACCA might start including AI as a requirement, but there’s been no official announcement around that. It’s not something firms should rely on as happening any time soon.

And if it doesn’t, then these system-designer accountants could be hard to find - and competitive to hire. They may demand higher salaries. They may need to be sourced from other industries (at a cost). Will firms need to reduce headcount to accommodate this spend? Will it penalise scale because of training complexity?

This might also look different for firms that ‘build’ compared to ‘buy’. Or, more accurately, how the firm uses AI.

Where AI is predominantly used for efficiency, it’s not actually making money. I talked about this last week in the context of ROAI (return on AI). There’s a risk that ‘buyers’ end up in this group:  AI may have taken over many repetitive, low-value tasks, but it’s hard to measure the gains. The money required to invest in system-designer accountants will need to come from somewhere, and it won’t be from ROAI.

Where AI is used to build revenue (creating new propositions and/or selling new products back to other firms) the money to reinvest might be there, but a different challenge emerges.

The more system designers you hire, the fewer traditional accountants you need. When do we reach critical mass — and where’s the tipping point? 

Are firms sleepwalking into a broken talent pipeline?

This discussion raises some big questions.

Can it ever work for firms to have system designers and traditional accountants in the team, or are the talent strategies just too different?

And, build or buy, what happens once a firm has delegated all its entry-level and repetitive processes to AI? What replaces the traditional grunt work → competence → confidence pathway? How do junior staff, or those hired more for their AI excellence, learn accounting skills?

We’re still making sense of AI

There are benefits and drawbacks to buying and building. It certainly made for a dynamic debate at the AI Exchange!

I think that, at a minimum, an interest in how AI can be used to solve problems (and create value for clients) will be essential moving forward. What’s important is that we keep learning by doing and discussing the risks.

Fancy joining us for the next AI Exchange? Drop me a message on LinkedIn or reply to this email.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the AIX dinner in January and their contributions to this article: Bepi Jones, David Rogers, Dom Noakes, Andrew Douthwaite, Luke Streeter, Yogesh Patel, Rob Collings, Arun Mehra and Sebastian Trif.

At the latest AI Exchange dinner in January we asked: who has a formal AI strategy and whose AI usage is more ad hoc?

First we had to agree on what we meant by a ‘formal’ AI strategy and how we’d define it. While members of the AIX are all serious about wanting to use AI, we’re still in the early days of AI adoption in firms. Can we really say that any firm’s AI strategy is stable, or is it regularly changing shape? And with use cases still being explored to find AI’s true value in a firm, how much of an ‘AI strategy’ is found through trial and error - in deciding what not to use today?

Formalising the firm’s approach to AI could help build team engagement and get everyone working together. It also helps to concretise the value of AI to clients and alleviate any concerns. I know a number of firms are being asked by their clients how they’re using AI and what this means for them (more specifically, their pricing).

Crucially, though, if we’re talking about seeing real ROI from AI usage (and why wouldn’t we be?), then we need to make our purpose clear. We need to know what we’re doing with AI as a firm, why we’re doing it, which platform(s) we’re using, and what benefits that should deliver.

This, fundamentally, is an AI strategy articulated. But there’s some thinking that needs to be done first.

How to measure the returns of AI today?

There are several ways to approach measuring RoAI (returns on AI). The key questions are whether these metrics paint a clear enough picture or whether they’re anecdotal, and how meaningful they are to the firm. 

Time saved on tasks could be enough on its own to prove AI’s value. One AIX member has cut proposal writing down from 3 hours to 30 minutes by integrating AI, creating a trackable monetary impact.

Team engagement is on the more anecdotal side, but valuable nonetheless. This comes down to the firm’s culture around AI and how embedded the curiosity around and commitment to AI is. One person talked about increasing AI accountability in the team by running ‘lunch and learns’ on each platform and allocating a time slot in every weekly meeting for sharing AI tips. You can invest in a Pro account for every person on the team, but ensuring the benefits are made visible company-wide will help drive adoption.

Adoption rates are a good metric to consider in an AI strategy. You don’t want to waste money and ‘seats’ on users who aren’t getting value. Plus, right now it’s easier for firms to measure the cost of AI adoption rather than the financial gains. We know that if AI can help get proposals out to prospects faster, this should result in a higher conversion rate. But in most (or all?) firms, that’s yet to be verified.

This raises another question about how firms can build on AI’s efficiency gains and make it a margin lever. Using AI in place of a human to prepare proposals and run other laborious, repetitive workflows will save time and therefore money, but for how long? Clients are getting savvier about AI themselves. Some are coming to their firm, aware that AI is likely being used for certain tasks, and asking for a more competitive price. 

A long-term AI strategy will look at how AI can help expand revenue in the future.

So what parts of accounting are actually worth using AI for, and why?

AIX: January 2026 dinner

If AI worked perfectly today, what would you happily never do again tomorrow?

We had a unanimous answer at AIX. Given how increasingly inefficient and frustrating admin feels as tech and AI evolve, everyone would want to delegate the admin of running a firm entirely to AI. 

“I hate anything taking a minute longer than it should. And I get really frustrated with the way things are done, generally, in the accountancy profession”, one person explained.

And I get it. Many of a firm’s admin tasks are joyless and low-value. They don’t challenge us as accountants or make us feel fulfilled. And, to make matters worse, the way many firms handle this admin is harder than it should be because of poor interoperability. 

That’s why AI is so tempting as a problem-solve for admin tasks. It creates connections between otherwise disjointed tools. There is such a thing as an over-reliance on AI though and we still need to keep a human-in-the-loop. In fact, for some tasks, AI might not even be the solution at all. Automating isn’t actually new to the accountancy world, and a firm could achieve the same automation by (better) exploiting existing tech.

We should look further ahead, too. Admin tasks almost certainly fall into the camp of efficiency gain and not margin lever. This is where I, personally, start to get really excited about AI. AI has the potential to turn our industry upside down. We can use it to innovate, disrupt, and improve the sector as a whole. 

I loved this observation from one AIX member: “Why is it that the perception of accountants is what it is? Because, by nature, it’s seen to be boring, repetitive, simple, and dated. That’s the perception people outside of the sector have of the sector. But this is where AI is effectively breaking the image of accounting.”

If traditional accounting - compliance, bookkeeping, and data processing - disappeared tomorrow, delegated totally to AI, what would firms turn to next? Repositioning to ‘complex compliance’ might only buy us time. Won’t this proposition also be transformed by AI, albeit further down the line?

There are practical, technical, and strategic questions that firms need to answer before they can set an AI strategy in place. For example:

Practical:

• Where should humans remain firmly in the loop to protect value (and the firm’s reputation)?

Technical:

• How do we overcome poor data hygiene within firms? Because, right now, it’s a major concern.

Strategic:

• Are we emotionally attached to work that clients don’t actually value? Is everything we do today ultimately going to be commoditised and lose its value to firms and clients alike?

• How can AI help firms create new value-adding services and protect their position in the market? What’s blocking the way?

The size of the data issue and what it means for AI strategy

I mention data hygiene as a technical consideration. But it’s a strategic one, too.

Clean, organised data is essential for efficiency gains. It’s a fundamental requirement - overlooking it will (and does) stop firms from adding value and expanding revenue. 

At AIX, the group agreed that learning how to use AI is one thing (made easier by communities like this). It’s getting the right data in the right place that’s hard, and vendors aren’t much help (they don’t talk to one another for the benefit of the profession).

Bad data management is found in firms that have grown by acquisition. Here, the data is often siloed and spread across many legacy systems. 

It happens in smaller firms too, where multiple platforms are patched together. Data ends up duplicated. And old, irrelevant documents are mixed in with up-to-date ones.

Fragmented, inconsistent data like this could be a firm’s biggest constraint on formal, long-term AI adoption, and a firm’s legacy systems can seriously hamper progress.

Sure, the AI technically ‘works’, but it produces useless or risky outputs.

LLMs need clean data to achieve good results, making the ‘single source of truth’ much more than an IT issue. When teams feed messy data to platforms, and use multiple platforms to achieve the same outcome, this is probably going amplify inconsistency rather than fixing it.

Some newer AI tools can tolerate messier inputs, but only to a point. Solid foundations still matter and firms need to be honest about their data hygiene before adopting AI.

“The thing I feel like accountancy firms in particular are pretty terrible at having is a standardised structure. It’s really difficult, but it is overcomeable. It just takes a lot of time”, one person observed.

More questions than answers

What I’ve shared here is the outcome of hours of debate at the AI Exchange. And, as it stands, the conversation raised more questions than answers when it comes to AI strategy.

It’s fine for a firm to be AI-curious: for individuals to be dabbling and trying to find their feet.

But when a firm wants to embed AI into its practices, questions need to be asked and decisions need to be made. Failing to do so could damage the client experience - the opposite of achieving returns!

We’re right to be asking these questions. They’ll help tease out the real value of AI in firms moving forward. And in groups like the AI Exchange, we’ll continue to experiment and evaluate if you’d like to join us?

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the AIX dinner in January and their contributions to this article: Bepi Jones, David Rogers, Dom Noakes, Andrew Douthwaite, Luke Streeter, Yogesh Patel, Rob Collings, Arun Mehra and Sebastian Trif.

What happens if we assess an accounting firm like a potential acquirer or investor? 

Would the majority of firms be deemed successful, sustainable businesses? I’m going to go out on a limb and say no.

There are several reasons for this. One being that many accountants set out to build firms using their existing skills and experience as the springboard. They were trained in personal or corporate tax, auditing, statutory accounting, management reporting, processes, etc., so that’s what they choose to offer. While entrepreneurs would spot an opportunity, then test for product-market fit and gather customer feedback, many firm leaders jump straight in without strategic planning; they do what they’ve always done.

It also feels like many firms weren’t designed to be highly profitable. That’s why private equity often has to come in, because for a lot of firms, that’s the only way they can realise cash.

This issue came up in discussion at this year’s Finance Takes The Piste (FTTP), and was widely agreed to be holding plenty of firms back. If we were to build an accounting firm today and take it from zero to £1 million revenue, our careers to date as accountants wouldn’t be where we’d start.

Instead we’d look at what’s shaping our clients’ industries and what factors drive change in the economy at large. We’d focus more on building a competitive business model, that just happens to be in accounting. 

Here’s what we might consider in doing so.

What comes first, the offer or the audience?

Formal business training encourages entrepreneurs to start with the end user. If you know who you want to serve and the problem you can help them solve, you can build an engaging product.

But there’s the challenge: how often do accountants think like entrepreneurs when they start a firm?

“Knowing your context is hugely powerful, and we don’t do enough of that”, said one Finance Takes The Piste attendee, and I have to agree. Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and value propositions should be everyday language in accounting firms as they are in many other businesses, but I know from experience they’re not.

It’s this kind of context that helps a firm to leverage its skills to best serve its client base. I don’t think it’s necessarily a case of choosing which to focus on first - identifying clients or deciding on an offer - because the two should develop in tandem. In best practice, we should also be open to feedback from new and existing clients, or Account Planning Workshops, that challenge us to diversify and evolve our propositions to better meet their needs.

But if we’re talking about starting a brand-new firm from scratch, I certainly wouldn’t want to launch without having validated my proposition with a potential audience.

Strategic, systemised marketing

The idea of spending 70% of operating expenses on marketing might send some accountants into shock, but it’s what one FTTP member suggested.

Again, if we look at the firm as a business, why not invest heavily in marketing? And, while we’re at it, why not take that marketing seriously - and put proper lead management systems in place - to get ROI?

Sales and marketing might not come naturally to all accountants, but generating and closing leads is fundamental to a successful enterprise. 

As one person says: “What I’ve seen in the last 10 years in accounting firms is that they spend a lot of money on marketing and then don’t have a process. They let anybody handle an enquiry, and it’s all in an Excel spreadsheet or in various team members’ inboxes.” 

That needs to change. And with the range of AI-powered platforms and workflows available today, there’s little excuse to fall behind.

To niche or not to niche?

Several leaders at this year’s FTTP are eyeing up a niche, from the creator economy to construction. They consider it the fastest way to grow - at least to the £1 million mark. They say: “Pick a niche there, and then gun it, and that's how you're going to do 35% operating margin in year one.”

Again, this comes down to really knowing your client. Narrowing down to a niche doesn’t mean narrowing down your offer. Instead, you can look to diversify and add services within a client base, using the close relationships and deep industry knowledge you have to shape up new propositions.

Niching carries some risk, of course. Taking the opposite approach and going for volume helps remove the issue of putting “a lot of eggs in a small basket” and not growing as quickly as you’d want as a result.

Interestingly, a few members of the group agreed that their blueprint for a £1 million revenue firm would be a baseline of compliance with a layer of bespoke, value-added services on top. Niching is arguably more effective for any advisory or value-added proposition as expertise carries weight.

Are accountants too cautious to be entrepreneurs?

Most accountants are cautious; they’re logical, reserved, and tend to seek out structure. Entrepreneurs tend to be more assertive and driven by ambition.

So do accountants need to challenge themselves to step outside of their comfort zone and act more entrepreneurially? Is this where it makes sense to partner up with a more naturally entrepreneurial and commercial co-founder? I’ve noticed several new firms with a founding team that looks like this. It’s a good way to balance out the approaches and give both personality types a seat at the table.

I’ve spoken before about our industry becoming commoditised. Following the status quo structures and doing things as they’ve always been done before is a fast way for firms to lose traction. Successful businesses know when to change it up and take calculated risks.

Risk isn’t something all traditional accountants are comfortable with, calculated or not. Attempts to evolve the company culture might make it hard for teams to see eye-to-eye and speak the same language. It’s something firm leaders need to consider when training and developing their staff. 

That said, an entrepreneurial mindset can be applied or explored within existing firms. Expanding current clients is a good place to start. “There's so much money that's potentially left on the table with clients that you have,” - within a niche or not. 

Don’t let discomfort get in the way. A successful business owner wouldn’t, after all. When was the last time you took a step back and asked yourself “how would I start a firm today?” The answer may surprise you!

Thanks to everyone who attended Finance Takes The Piste 2026 for their contribution to this article: Adam Ginns, Andrew Cookson, Arun Mehra, Benjamin Sampson, Carrie Hobden, Emily Dear, Eriona Bajrakurtaj, Fraser Campbell, Gavin Spencer, John Toon, Jonathan Gaunt, Joseph Cox, Justine Marshall, Lisa Marshall, Louise Walpole, Luke Streeter, Pete Everett, Phil Hobden, Sebastian Trif, Stuart McLeod, Yogesh Patel.

We asked a big question at this year’s Finance Takes The Piste: if you were to build a firm of the future starting today, what would you do (and not do)?

The group was divided.

Some said they’d focus on building a standardised process-led offer. They’d use heavily automated workflows and push clients to self-serve. A “vending machine” accounting firm, as one member observed. 

Some pulled in the opposite direction. They thought they’d invest in more of a “butler” approach. Bespoke, premium, service-led. People over process.

Or in other words, a compliance-only firm or an advisory-first firm - and you might be surprised which leaders sided with each!

These two concepts sit at distant ends of the spectrum of opportunity. Does one have more potential than the other? What do clients want? Is it possible to do both and answer both sets of needs? 

And for the leaders who said they’d switch from one type of firm to another, is one business model harder than it seems on the surface? Or is it just that the grass always appears greener on the other side?

Why the “vending machine” firm?

The most immediate answer here is: because you can. With technology advancing the way it is, doing anything other than leaning into and maximising on AI can feel like swimming against the tide.

That said, the argument I typically make for automating within a firm is that it frees up team time to focus on higher-value activities. What are those activities in a purely vending machine-style model? A heavily automated firm - one that’s creating a point of difference and competitive advantage around its use of tech - may arguably need in-house developers at the helm. 

And if it does, then the less time spent on traditional accounting and bookkeeping activities means more time to focus on proprietary use of digital platforms - even building and selling systems of its own. In fact, one of our party is looking to hire engineers in place of accountants going forward, and I’ve had similar conversations with other firm leaders.

A vending machine firm would struggle to sell traditional accounting services at a premium. Costs would need to be controlled: “I’d bring in offshore people first, because it’s cheapest. They’ll be my engine - especially if we’re doing compliance work”, as one member of the group explained. The firm would need to find novel ways of expanding revenue, whether that’s through using tech to handle clients at a higher volume or building and selling its own solutions back to the market.

Achieving growth by volume is far easier with a standardised model. And there’s a strong argument for the operating resilience it provides. “It takes away some of those pain points that we had when we were 30 clients and 10 people. We had a lot of eggs in a small basket, and we didn't grow as quickly as we wanted to over a longer period of time. I think we sort of narrowed our opportunity,” was one person’s reflection.

You have to question the role of traditional accountants in a vending machine-style firm, though. Digital literacy becomes an essential skill in a firm that relies so much on AI. Employees would need to be confident and competent in chaining tools together; they need to be curious and passionate about emerging tech and how it can be deployed.

These aren’t skills we’re training new accountants to have today. Last year’s Finance Takes The Piste debated the need to hire salespeople and train them in accounting. But has our thinking moved on? Do business models of the future demand hiring developers and giving them accounting skills instead?

In short, for a vending machine model to work:

• AI needs to be at the very core of the model. A process-led firm can only stay competitive by seeking new and better ways to increase efficiency and volume.

• Talent strategies should be carefully considered. How are offshore teams best used? What percentage of the firm is trained in accountancy versus AI and software development? What impact does this have on client trust and the firm’s reputation?

• The business must appeal to like-minded clients. Not all clients are ready to delegate to AI. Those who are might expect this to come in exchange for lower costs and, maybe, greater flexibility. The vending machine model must be pitched carefully to avoid churn in a commoditised space.

• Tech becomes not just an enabler, but an opportunity for growth. There’s risk in building your whole model around third-party platform providers. What happens if (when) their prices increase, their pricing structure changes, or they remove key functionality? Building rather than buying could make a firm’s tech-driven model more protectable.

FTTP2026: Chairlift chat

Why a “butler” service?

Challenging the cookie-cutter, vending machine approach, one person asked: “How do you create loyalty or stability of the personnel within the firm if you're not doing interesting things? What you’re saying sounds so…boring?”

Another said: “If that's the future of accounting, I want none of it.”

And those are fair challenges to make.

There aren’t many people who got into accounting with the mission to use more tech. If you believe that clients “want a human relationship, not a machine” and want to work closely with people, then a human-led butler-style service will feel a much better fit.

A firm is less likely to niche with vending machine operations. A butler is expected to have deep, personal knowledge of their client and their client’s sector; to understand their unique needs and be proactive in solving them. That’s where niching can really add value. Spreading yourself too thin over a higher volume of disparate clients isn’t a growth strategy - it risks being a distraction.

Questions still arise over who you’d hire for a successful butler-style firm. Technology plays an important role in all firms, as I’ve shared in previous newsletters. And you’ll want team members who question the status quo ways of working to deliver more value to clients. Commercial acumen, insight, storytelling - technology isn’t in opposition to these skills. It certainly doesn’t have to make firms lazier or complacent. In fact, it can meaningfully support an insightful, human-led, and premium service as discussed in my newsletter: The business case for advisory as AI adoption grows.

A bespoke, butler-style accounting firm that’s not deploying AI well could struggle with margins and may fail to appeal to younger, entrepreneurial clients. Where technology is used well - to strengthen insights and relationship-building - the firm’s proposition will be stickier and harder for competitors to copy.

The future-proofed iteration of this model will:

• Anticipate the future needs of clients and hire against them. Clients’ businesses are evolving, so ours need to too. What we might have hired for 5 years isn’t what we’d hire for today - even in a firm that focuses on people. 

• Not overlook technology, even if the core of its service is human and insight-led. AI can boost performance in human-led firms. Here are just a few entry-level ideas for firms to explore. 

• Consider niching as a means of building competitive advantage and ensuring client loyalty. The strength of a vending machine model lies in predictability and processing volume. A butler can’t serve as many clients at a time, and its service will be more varied, but it can build expertise and create a highly ‘sticky’, trustworthy offer.

• Be realistic about scale and look to expand existing accounts. Because a butler firm can’t compete with volume, revenue expansion comes more from selling within existing accounts and identifying new ways to serve its client base.

FTTP2026: Working hard, or hardly working

Which model is right for you?

Both models are feasible and valuable in today’s accounting landscape. After all, Finance Takes The Piste brings together some of the best leaders in our industry, so the debate wouldn’t have taken place if one or both models were lacking potential.

One way to decide might be to ask yourself: “why not?” If you chase standardisation and volume, you won’t get to know clients well and you might end up competing against software vendors rather than other firms. If you choose to be bespoke and premiumised, you have to accept the level of risk that comes with fewer, higher-paying accounts. You might find yourself simultaneously always-on (versus the hands-off vending machine approach) and with always one eye on your margins.

Think about your values and the values of the firm. What do you want to be known for? What do you want to get from the work you do; what brings you fulfilment? Who do you want to surround yourself with? What skills do you have, and what skills do you value in other people?

The conversation we had at FTTP about how we’d build ‘the firm of the future’ went far deeper than what I’ve pulled out here. The group considered factors as far-reaching as personal passions, people development, profession advocacy, client interests, business model resilience - and how to balance all of the above! It just goes to show how hard it is to establish a successful modern practice.

Thanks to everyone who attended Finance Takes The Piste 2026 for their contribution to this article: Adam Ginns, Andrew Cookson, Arun Mehra, Benjamin Sampson, Carrie Hobden, Emily Dear, Eriona Bajrakurtaj, Fraser Campbell, Gavin Spencer, John Toon, Jonathan Gaunt, Joseph Cox, Justine Marshall, Lisa Marshall, Louise Walpole, Luke Streeter, Pete Everett, Phil Hobden, Sebastian Trif, Stuart McLeod, Yogesh Patel.

How will firms make money in 2030?

Traditional accounting may not hold much revenue potential. As more firms use AI to handle basic bookkeeping tasks, it comes at the cost of differentiation between one service delivery and another. If commoditisation makes clients more price conscious (and why wouldn’t it), firms certainly won’t be able to charge premium fees for this kind of work anymore.

And that’s where advisory comes in.

Identifying an ICP

Advisory isn’t immune to AI influence. But where AI is becoming an “existential threat to traditional accounting” (to quote John Toon at an AI Exchange/AIX meet-up last year), AI can be used as a tool to increase the value of advisory.

On one hand, you’ve got a less ownable, less protectable, and arguably less valuable set of accounting services that AI is encroaching on day by day - replacing human activity. At an AIX dinner in January, the group discussed how AI was already slowing down hiring in some firms and may soon shrink the team (or at least amplify revenue per employee).

On the other hand, you’ve got the potential for distinctive, ownable, and meaningful value-adding services, where AI is used to amplify human minds - and serve clients - better than it’s ever done before.

I’m not saying that traditional accounting firms are dead in the water. But I do think the business case for advisory gets stronger as AI adoption grows. And that firms should explore whether advisory can be added to their existing service catalogue.

Why my money’s on advisory for long-term traction

The below table featured in my newsletter, ‘Everyone’s talking about advisory. But is there risk in becoming an advisory-only firm?’

If you read it, then you’ll know I made the argument for both/and rather than either/or in the compliance versus advisory debate.

That argument is all the more compelling when you bring in AI.

The tasks in the left column (A) are repetitive, largely standardised, and capable of being delegated to AI. The deliverables in the right column (B) are bespoke to specific clients. They require strategic thinking, commercial acumen, and challenging the status quo. 

If technology can be used to process most, if not all, of column A, what does good, better, and best look like? It comes down to firms buying the best tools and has less to do with the talent in the firm itself - unless you choose to build a platform in-house instead of buying off-the-shelf.

There’s scope to outperform and outmanoeuvre other firms with an advisory offer. When the people you hire and how you deliver work become a true competitive advantage, you have full control over how that advantage is leveraged long-term.

And, better still, AI isn’t a threat to a firm’s operations and revenue potential here. In fact, it’s a catalyst for why advisory is a smart move. It both:

• Alleviates teams of repetitive, time-consuming, low-value activities - making space for advisory.

• And can help handle and synthesise the data that powers a successful advisory services, potentially getting more value from that data than a person could manage alone.

Using AI to make space for advisory (tips from the AI Exchange)

Agentic AI now covers many of the task-oriented activities that accountants used to do, whether alone or as a way of complementing offshore activity.

How exactly firms are using AI today is always a talking point at AIX meetings. These are just some of the use cases that members have shared:

• AI to triage email - AI can instantly sort, categorise, and prioritise incoming email. Widely agreed to be one of the biggest (if not the biggest) time drains in modern firms, any amount of time you can take out of email management is time you can spend on higher-value activities. AI can even ‘disappear’ messages until you need to read them again to achieve inbox zero (and a clear state of mind).
  

• AI to perform client-facing services, like tax returns - One AIX member has created an AI-powered conversational front-end for processing tax returns. Clients still feel like they’re in dialogue with the firm. But a team member doesn’t have to get involved until the QA/checking stage. 

At this level, the role of AI is to free up the team’s time so that they have space to design and deliver strategic, consultative services (and increase revenue). Here, AI is making every minute of the team’s time more valuable for the firm and its client alike.

Using AI to strengthen advisory (tips from the AI Exchange)

The AI we have access to today will not replace the team entirely. Keeping a human-in-the-loop for QA is still essential in all accounting and bookkeeping tasks. 

And used in the right way by the right types of people, AI can boost what a smart, strategic accountant can deliver. AI can’t fill in for true, deep, client and sector knowledge. But it can augment it.

For example:

AI as a super-brain for client intel 

Members of the AIX are seeing great results from using AI platforms - namely Google’s NotebookLM - as repositories of client data (qualitative and quantitative). Capable of ingesting, comparing, and discussing multiple content sources at once, one AIX member said, “It’s like being in The Matrix, where Neo plugs himself in and learns Kung Fu in 30 seconds!” 

Learn more about using NotebookLM in my newsletter: 12 AI tools and how accountants are using them today (part 1).

AI to consolidate months of call transcripts 

Most video call software now captures AI transcripts as standard. But these transcripts are rarely re-reviewed and are often saved in silo. The only information that gets carried from a meeting is what the people in attendance take with them. 

That leaves plenty of space for bias and human error (distraction or poor memory). 

Upload call transcripts to an LLM to see what’s really being said; the salient points that come up time and time again over the months. AI can also be used to isolate key client milestones (professional or personal) and trigger a workflow that adds these dates to your calendar. 

As an AIX member rightly pointed out: “If you try to keep that information in your head, you’ll max out.” With the support of AI, you don’t have to worry. It’s a “superpower” to deliver gold-standard client service.

AI to automatically prioritise your PMS

A meeting is only as effective as the actions that come from it. 

AI can help surface essential information from call transcripts and link it to the next platform in the chain, like a practice management system, without human interaction. This saves the team from manually updating the PMS. It also helps overcome the human bias, distraction, and forgetfulness that can lead to less obvious actions being ignored.

Advisory is all about nuance and spotting opportunity between the lines. It’s not that people aren’t capable of doing that, because they are. But AI can make it easier and more habitual.

At the very least, AI stores and recalls more information in a moment than a human brain can handle. From there, you can use the knowledge you’ve developed of a client and industry to select what’s important.

Are you using AI effectively in your firm?

AI has use cases in both compliance and advisory. In fact, it might be the conduit that leads from one to the other: delegate traditional accounting tasks to AI to give teams the time they need to serve advisory clients.

Join the AI Exchange/AIX to spend time with other accountancy leaders exploring AI. We aim to meet semi-regularly for dinner and discussion. Just drop me a message on LinkedIn or hit ‘reply’ to this or any of my emails.

If you’ve been following along with the newsletter, you’ll have seen last week’s newsletter on Account Planning Workshops (APWs). In it, I talked about how we ran APWs at flinder, and why I believe they’re such valuable tools for advisory and growing revenue in a firm.

I also mentioned three exercises I use in a typical APW session. 

These exercises are tried and tested by me and the flinder team, and have their origins at PwC where I spent a number of years in consulting.

Exercise 1: Pain points and propositions

In this exercise, the group identifies 2-3 decision-making stakeholders in the client account. Who these stakeholders are, what roles they play in the client’s business, are up to you. Who are likely to be your buyers, as well as your supporters? It might be that the CEO has ultimate sign-off on partners, but who else should you have on side as a buyer of your services?

Brainstorm their probable pain points first - business pains and personal pains too.

What do we mean by personal pain points? 

These are the challenges and limitations stakeholders face in their roles that impact them personally. For example, a Head of Operations may want to look good and deliver a supply chain project well, or impress the CEO to get promoted. The more you can empathise with what’s going on for each stakeholder at an individual level, the more compelling your sales pitch will be when it comes to presenting your solution.

An empathy map is a helpful tool here: focus on what each stakeholder is thinking and feeling (the stuff they might not say out loud) in particular.

You might have a clear idea of their pain points based on ongoing conversations, or you may need to reflect on what’s happening inside their business and category to deduce them for yourselves.

Technology can support this, too. 

At our AI Exchange event in November, one accounting leader recommended Google NotebookLM as a tool to aggregate and analyse client data at volume and summarise the insights. In preparation for an APW, you can upload AI transcripts from the last 6 months of client calls and ask NotebookLM to pull out the pain points for you. You might be surprised at what clients are telling you in those few minutes of ‘small talk’ at the start and the end of each conversation.

Another way to get to the heart of a pain point is to use the ‘5 Whys’. 

Asking ‘Why’ five times can help isolate the root cause or impact of a stakeholder’s challenges: if a COO is losing control of operating costs, why is that a problem? When you have an answer, ask why is that a problem for them? And again, why is that problem a problem for them? And so on. Truly valuable innovation lies in resolving the root of the issue for them, rather than papering over the cracks.

Armed with a deep understanding of the pain points, it’s time to look at the firm. Do you already have a product or service that can help resolve this pain? If not, is there scope to develop a new proposition to meet the stakeholder’s needs and enhance the value of the account?

You may come up with various potential new propositions, and you’ll need to know which have the most impact.

Would a new advisory service help clients make more money or lower costs? Perhaps it delivers a more personal benefit, like spending more time with their kids or securing that promotion? Either way, grade your ideas as low, medium, or high importance to the stakeholder, ready for the next exercise.

Exercise 2: Vision statements

Here you’ll take the top pain points and most impactful propositions, developing a vision statement for each. Imagine you’re pitching the new idea to the client: how would you sell it in? What does success look like for them if you could help solve this pain?

I’ve talked about storytelling skills before, and the importance of making the client the hero of the story. This is essential in advisory. As Alex Bond Burnett, Academy Manager at Cowry Consulting, explains: “You are the guardian of the data that tells them the reality of what’s happening in their business [...] They’re in the thick of it. They need you to be able to help pull them out and see the landscape as it is.” 

Writing a vision statement is a good exercise to test your storytelling skills. Tell the story of the client’s transformation, from pain to benefit, from their point of view.

Exercise 3: Stakeholder heat mapping

In the last newsletter I stressed how important accountability is after an APW. Who is taking which action, how, by when, and what should they aim to achieve?

This exercise helps make that task allocation as strategic as it can be. 

The aim of a stakeholder heat mapping is to:

• Identify who client-side might be an influencer in a piece of work you want to progress

• Identify who firm-side has what relationship with them (trusted, guarded, resister, or weak - each of these relationship statuses has a colour in the matrix)

• Develop an action plan to develop that relationship and get closer to growing value.

It’s about understanding where the firm is today with relationships, at this moment in time. And either implementing actions to improve them or leveraging strong relationships to expand the account.

Start by mapping all the key client people on one axis, and your account team members on the other. Then:

• Highlight where you have trusted, guarded, resister, or weak relationships using the colours in the matrix.

• Highlight who has power, influence, or is not important to decision-making in the business.

Where someone in the firm’s account team has a trusted relationship with a power person, this is where to focus first. For client-side ‘influencers’, is their influence likely to be positive for the firm (i.e. an implementer) or negative (i.e. a blocker)? Again, where trusted relationships exist here, how can a blocker be encouraged to take a more positive position?

Relationships can be strengthened and stakeholders’ positions can shift. This heat mapping exercise may only capture a moment in time but it’s a really useful tool for directing your energy in the most effective way. The purpose is to improve relationships with buyers and influencers at your client.

Download my stakeholder matrix template here.

Has your Account Planning Workshop been successful?

How do you know whether these APW exercises have ‘worked’?

Have you:

• Identified the key decision-makers on the client side; their business and personal pain points that your firm could be able to resolve?

• Defined a clear, single - or set of - propositions that track back to these pain points, turning current challenges client-side into an opportunity for both parties?

• Created the language for how you’ll start pitching this proposition(s) to clients, based on the benefits for them?

• Set actionable next-steps and assigned them to the account team member who’s best placed to see results?

If yes, then I’d say you’re a lot closer to growing that account than you were just two hours earlier. And that, in essence, is what an Account Planning Workshop is all about.

Firms can’t stand still and expect to survive. 

Clients’ needs are changing, and evolving your offer is the only way to stay relevant - whether that means adding advisory to your services, innovating within an existing advisory offer, or broadening and optimising your compliance support.

Of course, introducing new service propositions unlocks new revenue potential, too. As one of our Finance Takes The Piste guests explained:“Sales isn’t always about new business. Sales is also about making sure clients are happy.” Identifying new ways to meet the needs of your existing clients will increase the value of the account and hopefully keep them with you for longer.

The Account Planning Workshop (APW) is a strategic tool for expanding revenue within existing relationships. Put simply, it’s an internal session with two distinct aims: 

1. To develop a deeper understanding of a client, their business, and the market they operate in.

2. To identify tangible, actionable ways to better support the client and grow the value of the account.

These insights are surfaced by reflecting on the client’s current opportunities and limitations, challenging your firm’s thinking or assumptions about what the client wants and what they value, then exploring fresh opportunities for your firm to support them.

As well as increasing revenue, an APW can help the firm innovate and stay competitive.

APW aim #1: Understanding your client better

The first half of an APW is spent sharing as much (relevant) data as you can about the account in question.

At flinder, we opened our APWs by setting the scene in detail, asking:

1. What’s happening inside this client’s account?

• What’s the current and historic scope of work?

• What’s their investment with us; one-off and/or recurring fees do they pay?

• What can the people closest to the account tell us about what’s working well and what isn’t?

2. What’s happening inside the client’s business, too?

• What’s their business model?

• Who are their core customers?

• What market segments do they target?

• What have been their key results and metrics trend? 

• Which other professional service providers do they use (and why)?

From there, the focus shifts to unpacking their relationship with the firm:

3. How is our relationship with key stakeholders?

• What feedback have they given us (good and bad)?

• What’s their NPS history?

• Who in their team has the power or authority to make decisions about their relationship with the firm? Who might be a blocker to account expansion? Who doesn’t have any particular influence but could advocate on our behalf?

• How strong is the firm’s relationship with each stakeholder in their team? Do we have strong and trusting relationships with decision-makers? Or are they more guarded and might hesitate to discuss new service propositions with us unless there’s minimal risk for them?

Capture answers to all of the above somewhere - on flip charts, a whiteboard, as sticky notes on a Miro board, wherever - and aim to get perspectives from everyone in the room. That means anyone involved, from a fractional CFO (or partner) to the manager and bookkeeper, and anyone else who works with the client first-hand. They all have valuable insights into what's going on in the account.

You might be generating a lot of data at this stage (I mean reams and reams of notes), but that’s good. You’ll need it. Because the second half of an APW looks at synthesising all that data through a commercial lens.

APW aim #2: Tangible, actionable ways to grow the account

For an APW to be worth the investment, it should end with clear, actionable outcomes.

I’d say it’s not worth wasting the team’s time if the next steps aren’t something you can commit to - even if those next steps are just to reconvene and reassess in a quarter, if no obvious revenue expansion ideas come up this time around. 

Ideally, though, you’d wrap up the APW with an action plan with owners, dates, and milestones to measure progress. These actions should all focus on how to build out the new client-centred proposition(s) your APW has highlighted.

• Where is the low-hanging fruit? (i.e. important pains for the stakeholder to solve where you already have a proposition to match)
  

• Where is there new value to unlock? (i.e. important pains for the stakeholder to solve where you could easily or reasonably develop an offer)
  

• If you’ve identified weak relationships with stakeholders/low NPS score, think about why this might be and develop a mitigation action per insight. You’ll struggle to upsell within an account with low trust or low engagement, so improving the NPS score is a priority moving forward.

I’d always recommend documenting next steps in a project management tool (we used Asana at flinder), and assigning a date and owner for every task. 

Accountability is key if you want to grow.

Next up: The 3 exercises I recommend for every APW

APWs were always a powerful tool for us at flinder, and we took inspiration for how we ran them from our time at PwC, where the Account Planning Workshop format was extremely effective. 

In my next newsletter, I’ll share my three favourite exercises to use in APWs: pain points and propositions, vision statements, and stakeholder mapping.

Until then: want more growth insights from the industry’s leading firms? Download the Finance Takes The Piste 2025 whitepaper for free to hear from 30 accounting leaders about how they’re expanding revenue.

With two ex-PwC co-founders and a background in consulting, flinder was always going to be an advisory-focused firm. 

But the reason it worked so well as a strategy was that it resonated with clients. We knew our niche sectors well, we learned what clients cared about, and we earned ourselves the position of proactive partner, rather than reactive resource.

Advisory allows you to sit with your clients, rather than opposite them as other firms do. At flinder, this helped reinforce our deep understanding of their business and forged long-lasting retention.

Early followers of my newsletter would have received my mini-series on CIMs. (If you didn’t see it, head to the website and type ‘CIM’ in the search bar to come across all three.)

The CIM that sold flinder engaged rationally and emotionally. (Yep, emotion matters in accounting - and for advisory, in particular.) It showcased why we built the model the way we did: why our service was ‘sticky’, why we’d developed the right pricing strategy, and why the business had longevity and the potential for growing demand.

So let’s rewind back from 2024 when flinder was sold and return to 2017 when flinder was formed as an idea for a business based on mine and Luke’s experiences to date. 

What are the key elements to consider when building an advisory-focused firm?

Identifying an ICP

Advisory demands that you have a crystal-clear idea of who you want to work with. 

Having an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is important in all firms, but the closer you want to be to a client’s business, the deeper your insight needs to be.

Clear vision and ethos

A compliance offer is relatively standardised, but advisory is nuanced. It’s less about delivering a product or output, like VAT returns, and more about how you show up in your work; the behaviour of the firm and its staff, as long-term client partners.

That’s why the firm’s vision and ethos are crucial to define.

Brand design principles

I won’t go into detail on brand design here because, believe me, there’s a lot that I could say! 

Instead I’ll just stress that brand is an essential consideration - and one we don’t think or talk about often enough for accountancy firms. Brand drives differentiation, creates emotional appeal, and fosters engagement with an ICP (and the team).

Finding a proposition

‘Proposition’ is short-hand for ‘value proposition’. And while we often drop the word ‘value’ when discussing propositions, it’s essential to the definition - as well as to the success of an advisory service. 

A proposition isn’t a mission statement. Nor is it a list of outputs or services you provide. It’s a clear, concise summary of the unique benefit(s) (or value) a firm delivers to its ICP.

Propositions help explain why a firm is different and what it promises to do. They bridge the gap between what clients want and need (even if they haven’t verbalised it yet) and the core competencies and differentiators the firm can leverage for success.

Once confident with its proposition(s), a firm can make strategic decisions (hiring, acquiring, expanding, etc) with that value prop in mind. A value proposition adds structure and focus to what you invest in; if an activity doesn’t help you do more of what you promise to do, for who you promise to help, then it probably shouldn’t be done.

Landing on a price

There’s little variance in the price of compliance products and services - that’s one of the reasons this market is so vulnerable to commoditisation. Brand names, like the Big 4, can charge more based on their reputation, not necessarily because the service is all that different.

With advisory, in comparison, firms can explore alternative pricing models versus the compliance side of their business (contingent fees based on % of cost saving or % of R&D, for example). There’s also more scope to premiumise pricing. Pricing is a positioner, after all. Higher fees can reflect specialised expertise, stronger outcomes, and a better client experience.

There are several ways to approach pricing your advisory offer; you’re accountants, so you’ll know how to run the numbers.

Culture and team

Advisory is more than ‘what’ you do, it’s how you do it too. It’s cultural. It needs to be in the firm’s DNA. 

Who you hire, what skills you hire for, and how you train and develop the team. What your leaders want to be known for: what lights them up and what they inspire in everyone else. These all matter on a conscious and subconscious level. 

Given that flinder was founded by me and Luke, with backgrounds in consulting and advisory, we had a natural affinity towards like-minded accountants. That said, we still made a concerted effort to hire the types of people we thought would support our propositions. Curious, commercial, challenger types. Accountants with the hard skills for compliance, plus the agility and ambition that advisory requires.

But I’ve talked a lot so far about new firms embracing an advisory proposition. How can existing firms, with a historic foothold in compliance and bookkeeping, start to make the shift? 

It isn’t easy. Not least because you’ll need to update your marketing comms, hiring plan, training strategy, and overall operations. And yet it’s the cultural and/or mindset shift that might be hardest to get right.

You may face reticence among existing staff. Some might even outwardly object. You’ll need to get the whole organisation on board with the value of an advisory offer; it needs to be a company-wide attitude, not a side-hustle that’s championed by just one or two outliers. 

If you’ve worked hard enough on your proposition and its alignment with your ICP, that shouldn’t be an impossible task.

Onboarding advisory clients

When onboarding new clients to advisory, you’ve got lots of open goals. You can ask them anything about their business, as it’s all fresh information. They don’t expect you to know much beyond the basics, so there’s plenty of intel to gather.

For existing clients, I’d try to develop a lot of the intel in-house. Get your team together to work through a scorecard, answering questions like ‘How good are they at managing supply chain?’, ‘How tight is their inventory management and costing?, ‘How detailed are their KPI reports?’ on a scale of 1 to 5. This will help identify weak points at the client’s end and areas you can help them improve.

Of course, if you don’t have that understanding in-house, you can ask a client to complete this exercise.

My next newsletter focuses on Account Planning Workshops, which I’d highly recommend running too. An APW uncovers new levels of insight and intelligence per client and can quickly help you realise if an advisory offer has legs. It might not be right for every existing client. And, if not, you’ve then got a strategic decision to make about which accounts you want to keep on, which you want to expand, and which you want to scale down.

To me, this is one of the biggest benefits of being an advisory-focused firm. While an advisory proposition isn’t narrow, it might force you to niche a little and get more discerning about the types of businesses you work with. 

If you’re seeking long-term, loyal relationships, that’s no bad thing at all.

We often hear of advisory being pitched against compliance - like firms should choose one of these two binary offers and stick to their lane.

But is there a right or wrong answer? 

Don’t both routes have their benefits?

Why it could be ‘both, and’ - and not ‘either, or’

In today’s tech-shaped landscape, you can still build a very successful business with compliance at the core. After all, with compliance, what’s going in is (more or less) standard, what you do with that data is (more or less) standard, and what’s coming out is standardised. 

That means there’s less to think about compared to the subjective, less predictable, think-on-your-feet nature of an advisory offer. Of course, I’m vastly over-simplifying what is still a relatively complex service, but for the majority of it, there’s a rule or guidance that can be followed. And that appeals to some firms.

For others, advisory is a more attractive prospect: they’re chasing (potentially) bigger margins and looking to offer clients a value-added, differentiated hook. Advisory accesses a different part of the accountant’s brain as well. It can bring new, fulfilling challenges and opportunities for growth.

I see it as less of an ‘either or’ between compliance and advisory, and more of a continuum. 

While I come from an advisory background, I think there’s potential for compliance-led firms to explore advisory services, and vice versa. 

We need to consider what clients want and need. 

Yes, advisory has revenue potential and aligns well with modern ideal customer profiles (ICPs). But compliance is the bread and butter of our industry. Firms might need to continue offering these fundamental services to clients who want a one-stop shop.

Plus, compliance covers a huge base of services, and does advisory…and there’s a grey line as one crosses over to the other.

What is advisory, really?

Advisory is prone to mispositioning. Some firms will say they offer advisory without having the necessary skills or service models to really make it happen. When I see firms with teams of mostly newly-qualified accountants offering Virtual FD, I’m ready to call BS.

Advisory is about harnessing deep industry experience to deliver real value-adding and insightful services. Where compliance looks at governance and control, advisory shifts gear towards commercial, strategic consultancy and input.

Example activities

We built flinder around an advisory-first offer. 

For me and my co-founder Luke, advisory was embedded in who we were and how we viewed the world, thanks to where we’d worked before. But advisory was still just one aspect of our offer: insight (CFO support), efficiency (i.e. bookkeeping), and control (annual accounts and tax) were all key to the service proposition.

How we viewed the finance function (© Ascendant)

What do firms gain by offering advisory?

Advisory is arguably more challenging to take to market. It requires a new or enhanced set of skills versus compliance and a fresh talent strategy. Plus, unless you nail the positioning right, it’s often seen as discretionary spend when budgets are tightened. That can make it harder to sell compared to ‘must-have’ compliance-led services.

What and who will you want to hire in an advisory-focused firm? Relationship and communication skills, empathy, commerciality, and other similar soft skills are a top priority. Traditional accounting hard skills become less material, replaced by new hard skills like data literacy and storytelling. That’s a big step change for some firms, especially those with entrenched processes around hiring, training, and development. 

Making advisory a meaningful part of your offer - something you’re not just paying lip service to - means cultural change as well. Your firm’s values and ethos may have to shift. The same can be said for leadership behaviours.

It’s a big task to take on. So what makes advisory worth it? 

For one, it’s a professional development challenge. Upskilling in any direction pushes us professionally and helps build new muscles. That’s why, for many (if not all) accountants, it’s more fulfilling work. 

There’s also the potential to increase revenue - or at least explore alternative pricing models versus bookkeeping and compliance. Think of the adage of the mechanic and the hammer: you can charge £1 per hammer tap, but £999 for knowing where to tap exactly.

Advisory can be a ‘stickier’ proposition, too. The deeper you’re embedded with a client, the more trusted and constant your input becomes. If you can charge more for advisory than compliance, and advisory clients have longer LTV, the business case writes itself. 

AI is also fundamental to the advisory conversation. As AI becomes more widely used in firms, advisory becomes a more manageable prospect and a savvier move. 

Firms can use AI to support advisory workflows (more on this in a dedicated newsletter soon).

At the same time, AI will begin to commoditise compliance and basic bookkeeping: there’s little competitive difference left when everyone’s deploying the same technology. What will differentiate us then?

I’ve written before about brand being a differentiator, but advisory may be another sustainable way for firms to create a point of difference or premiumised service as the market evolves. 

After all, if compliance becomes an AI-processed commodity, compliance-focused firms will be left competing against software vendors rather than other firms. And who's most likely to win that race to the bottom? Software vendors, of course.

What do clients need: compliance or advisory?

What will clients see as a valuable offer from firms in the next 3-5 years? 

The 2025 Finance Takes The Piste whitepaper talks about what’s happening client-side now as younger, entrepreneurial leaders enter the C-suite. These leaders are looking for collaborative partnerships. They want to work with firms that reflect their values around entrepreneurialism and innovation. As a sweeping generalisation, but a good reminder, clients generally want to maximise revenue, margin, or stakeholder value. How often do we step back and ask how we’re supporting this?

Advisory is a good way to meet that need - if you can build a compelling enough offer.

Coming up in the newsletter, I’ll be looking at various ways we delivered advisory services at flinder. First, I’ll pick up on Account Planning Workshops as a way to better understand clients and spot opportunities to expand the firm’s offering. We used APWs a lot at flinder, and to great effect. I highly recommend them for aligning your propositions to real client needs (and challenging the market-fit of your existing products and services).

Through an APW you can work out whether compliance, advisory, or a point along the continuum between both, is the right place for your firm to sit, based on the clients you have today and the clients you want to win in the future.

Why advisory was the right fit for flinder

flinder (now Ascendant) serves a niche market of tech and ecom businesses who are largely venture-backed. 

One of the benefits of operating in a niche is that you develop a deep understanding of the clients you serve: their KPIs, their pain points, and how you can help them succeed. We were able to have an opinion about that ICP and develop discrete propositions - like investor-readiness assessments - that fit their unique needs.

These were all the right ingredients for an advisory offer to work, as well as mine and Luke’s time at PwC. Advisory just made sense.

In the next newsletter, I’ll share how we built flinder as an advisory-first firm - and what I might do differently if we built it again today.

As for the mix of advisory and compliance that other firms should offer, I’d say do what you need to do. 

Clients’ needs are evolving on the whole, but only your firm knows what your firm’s clients need most. And only your firm knows the types of cultural values, skills, and propositions you’re most interested in developing, and what will be most valuable.

When was the last time you wrote down your service catalogue and critically assessed it against what clients view as a fundamental basic, and what clients might be willing to pay more for to drive their long-term business goals?

Here’s the second tranche of the 12 AI tools we’re using in the AI Exchange (which aren’t accounting specific). If you missed the first tranche, you can read them here. This half gets a little more creatively complex 🤩

7. ElevenLabs (AI audio creation)

How do your clients like to receive information? Is your firm guilty of death by PowerPoint or producing dense, dull reports because that’s how it’s always been done? 

ElevenLabs could help you innovate in your delivery and create a point of differentiation. 

Its AI text-to-speech feature can translate management commentary from a report that’s easy to ignore, to something engaging and unique that clients listen to on the go.

I think ElevenLabs has potential as a storytelling tool for firms who want to stand out.

8. Copilot Studio (build AI agents quickly)

An alternative for building and managing AI agents, Microsoft’s Copilot Studio could be a good option for firms already using Microsoft 365. 

While I’d still always recommend keeping a human-in-the-loop with AI, agents in Copilot Studio can be tasked with reviewing and derisking documentation, like new client agreements. Prompt the AI to ingest the uploaded document, compare it against historical contracts, identify any deviations or risks, and suggest changes to the text.

9. Nano Banana (AI image editing)

Nano Banana is an image generation and editing tool in the Google Gemini suite.

Your prompts need to be detailed for the AI image generation to work well. Consider the subject, the composition, what’s happening, and where, as well as the overall style of the image you need. The image editing feature is where it really excels: quickly, but subtly, apply your brand’s visual identity to images (like changing your t-shirt to a key brand colour) before posting it on LinkedIn.

Brand is incredibly valuable for a firm - especially in an increasingly saturated market. Every opportunity should be taken to reinforce your brand identity. So, if you need some images for LinkedIn, Nano Banana has it covered.

10. Descript (AI video co-editor)

If your firm uses or wants to use video, Descript is a great tool to explore. It can support with scriptwriting (for a client success story, for example) as well as generating entire videos from scratch and editing your footage to look more professional and on-brand.

And when it comes to splicing up your videos for social, Descript’s AI identifies the moments most likely to engage. It can also easily get rid of those awkward and tiresome “umms” that always seem to appear!

11. n8n (for automated workflows)

Similar to Zapier and Make, n8n is a low-code, drag-and-drop-style automation platform. Sales outreach is an area that many firms could build on, and tools like n8n make it more achievable.

In this n8n workflow example, AI automatically scrapes your LinkedIn posts for engagement (likes, comments, shares), before adding potential prospects to an Airtable database and triggering a personalised outreach sequence. You can also build AI agents in n8n or connect to LLMs for deep client or industry research.

Of course, there are many “simpler” uses of n8n too. Use it to create notifications that fire through to Slack or email based on cues coming from Xero e.g. overdue invoices or cash trends, prompting you to look in more detail and get in touch with a client. 

Or, if you’re feeling super adventurous, you could go one step further using ElevenLabs voice cloning to send a notification straight to the client. But maybe hold off on this until you’re happy with the output! 🤣

12. Cursor (AI-supported coding)

As far as AI-supported coding goes, Cursor is one of my favourites. In Cursor’s Agent mode, you type what you want to build and AI writes the code for you based on the workflow/task description. 

This is a more advanced way of building versus something like Lovable, and requires a level of comfort when working with code. In fact, after n8n, this is probably the most complex of the AI solutions on this list - it’s not for the faint-hearted or those just getting started with AI.

Where Cursor comes into its own is in stitching data together from one application to another, or where you want to build a small app without developers (or even pass a proof of concept onto a development team). 

Let’s take the example of extracting data from one of your applications, like Xero or HubSpot. Firms can build a pattern-finding layer with Cursor (and agent) on top of Xero or HubSpot to better and more consistently spot trends and opportunities.

Every firm has its nuances and its own way of looking at internal operational data. The point is that Cursor gives you the power to build something that, in the past, would have meant getting development support. With Cursor’s AI-supported coding, firms can build relatively quickly and surface a lot more insights than ever before. 

It's really your imagination that's the limit.

If you’ve got AI recommendations to share or want to learn more about AI tools outside of the accounting space, join the AI Exchange. Just drop me a message on LinkedIn or hit ‘reply’ to this or any of my emails.

Thanks to the members of the AI Exchange for their contribution to this article.

Accounting software has fallen behind the curve when it comes to AI. Many market the term ‘AI’, rather than actually embedding it. But we don’t have to wait for these vendors to catch up.

Other tools support accountancy as a business, if not as a function. These tools may not be advertised to us as accountants but there’s a lot we can use them for.

The 12 AI tools below can drive productivity, help operational efficiency, and make certain tasks that are less appealing to some accountants (like sales outreach) easier to plan and manage. They also come recommended by members of the AI Exchange.

1. PromptHub and 2. Prompting Guide (learning about AI)

When you want to learn more about AI, PromptHub (freemium subscription) and Prompting Guide (zero cost) are great places to start. Both contain libraries of information on AI models and prompting techniques to help you on your way.

For example:

• Learn what makes a good prompt

• Understand the difference between an AI workflow and an AI agent

• Get clever with prompting strategies, like How to Get Better Outputs from GPT-5

• Create prompt chains without any code

• Run and test your prompts before you take them live.

3. NotebookLM (an AI research assistant)

Google’s NotebookLM is an AI ‘thinking partner’. It can be used for research, content synthesis and generation, and more. It’s also a focused environment - it only works with the information you’ve given it to perform a certain task, reducing the risk of AI hallucination.

At our last AI Exchange meet-up, one of my favourite examples of a firm adopting NotebookLM came from Pete Everett, founder of GrowBe. For Pete, NotebookLM is a tool to inspire advisory and analyse clients’ needs - he’s using the focused environment to create a supercharged brain for storing broad and deep information about each client’s account. He’s feeding it meeting transcripts and other documents containing client intel. One ‘notebook’ recalls far more information than a human brain ever could, acting as a valuable repository for potential advisory solutions. 

Other sources of information could be customer satisfaction surveys, strategy sessions, or discovery calls, all uploaded to serve as a bedrock of what the company is “about”.

Being able to create this level of business insight in seconds makes preparing for an Account Planning Workshop so much easier (more on APWs to come in a future newsletter).

4. Perplexity Pro (like a Google search, but better)

Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine useful for research and information queries. Before ChatGPT caught up, Perplexity created a competitive edge by citing its sources as standard. ChatGPT does this now too, but Perplexity has protected its name as being the go-to cited research tool. It’s also ‘multi-engine’ with ‘orchestrated intelligence’, drawing on various AI models including GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, depending on what’s best for the task.

In Perplexity Pro, users get 10x as many citations per answer (so you can be sure your research is verified), as well as unlimited file uploads. This is a big win for comprehensive market scans, competitor analysis, fact-checking, and searching for statistics. Perplexity can help you prep to meet a new client with thorough (but fast) industry research. It can also assist in an Account Planning Workshop, helping you explore ways to expand an account by blending market mapping and SWOT analysis with your firm’s service catalogue.

5. Lovable (spin up prototypes and internal tools)

Once you’re comfortable ‘chatting’ with a GPT, Lovable feels like an easy next step. Lovable’s platform uses AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic to build apps and websites based on prompts. Tell Lovable what you want to build, and it’ll appear. No coding required.

Why not try Lovable for a:

• Lead magnet, such as a scorecard assessment

• New client onboarding app - offering a smooth, but effective, way to gather required information

• Client risk and complexity scorer - define your risk and consideration parameters and build it for consistency and governance

• Monthly client review tool - are you consistently reviewing the right things?

• And even a simple internal operations dashboard.

None of the above are going to be enterprise solutions, but they could work for you - and they could transform your efficiency and cost base.

6. Front (AI quick wins for customer success)

Front harnesses AI across customer service operations, including drafting, refining, and summarising emails and inferring CSAT scores.

I’ve made this point before in the newsletter, but it’s not only new business that helps a firm grow. Keeping existing clients happy is a growth strategy in itself. The AI features in Front can support that strategy, as well as remove silos to support the functioning of distributed or offshore teams.

If you’ve got AI recommendations to share or want to learn more about AI tools outside of the accounting space, join the AI Exchange. Just drop me a message on LinkedIn or hit ‘reply’ to this or any of my emails.

Thanks to the members of the AI Exchange for their contribution to this article.