A good friend of mine recently said, “Communication trumps everything in a service-based business.”

(And it appears that a lot of you would agree. My recent newsletter on how easily poor communication kills a client relationship inspired many of you to write back.)

We’ve all been on the giving and receiving end of poor communication. I know it’s not unheard of for firms to drop a client’s management accounts into their inbox on the 24th or 25th of the month with no context, no commentary, and very little communication in the lead-up to delivery. 

I think there’s no excuse for that, especially when it’s easier than ever to be in the ‘virtual room’ with clients using Slack, WhatsApp, or Teams. 

But this newsletter isn’t actually about the standard of communication between firms and clients. It’s about what happens when firm leaders find themselves on the other side of the equation - specifically during the M&A process.

It’s funny how fast poor communication irritates when the shoe is on the other foot. I’ve written before about how all-consuming and disorienting selling a firm can feel. For some sellers, it’s the biggest moment of their career. So it’s jarring, to say the least, when you’re left fighting for a buyer’s attention. 

If I were buying a business, I’m sure I’d move as quickly as possible on something I was interested in. And yet, from what I’ve heard, that’s rarely the case with acquirers today. 

My experience with flinder’s acquirers, Ascendant, was overwhelmingly positive, and it took us just 7 weeks to complete after agreeing heads of terms. But I know too many people in my circle who are trying to sell their firms and hitting a wall of poor communication. 

So what’s going on?

A glimpse inside the seller’s reality of M&A

Too much time passes with too little achieved

It’s widely understood that time kills deals. With too much distance, potential buyers lose interest or their priorities change. For sellers, the longer a transaction takes, the higher the uncertainty and the risk. The terms you’re discussing now might not be attractive or even workable for either party in six months’ time. Moving quickly is often better for everyone.

Unfortunately, weeks or even months can pass between buyer/seller meetings. There are often long periods of radio silence where someone on the acquiring end might be following up on documentation or consulting a lawyer. Or not - without regular status updates and check-ins, buyers can be left in the dark about what’s happening, when, and what that might mean for the deal.

A friend who’s in an active M&A process now told me, “I can’t see why all the conversations I’ve had with potential buyers couldn’t have been compressed into one to three days.”

Poor communication throughout a transaction that still ends up completing is one thing. But wasting months in inefficient back-and-forth with a potential buyer just for the deal to fall through? That’s so disheartening. 

Acquirers saying one thing and doing another

Poor communication isn’t only about speed. It’s also about integrity and practising what you preach. 

Now, I know not all potential transactions are going to come good. We must have met with 20 potential acquirers - and had one transaction nearly make it over the finish line - before finding Ascendant. So I’m not going to complain about potential buyers changing their mind. 

It’s fair enough for strategies to evolve, for budgets to be redistributed, or for questions to be raised during due diligence. Where it crosses the line is buyers saying something like, “If we give you an offer, there’s always scope for negotiation. So feel free to push back.” when they have zero intention of negotiating at all.

I’ve heard plenty of sellers report exactly that: buyers who come in hot with loads of enthusiasm, only to follow up with a conversation that doesn’t feel aligned (and how common is that client feedback in accounting? Now it’s our turn, it seems!)

Details changing mid-transaction

I promise I’m not saying that buyers are purposefully misconstruing information or manipulating sellers using silence as a weapon. Poor communication is probably the rule rather than the exception, but there’s still no right and wrong or good and bad between the parties.

The problem is, confusion breeds in the gap that poor communication leaves. It’s far too easy for details to fall through the cracks. Then when details change between one meeting and another (or even between stakeholders), and six weeks pass before that information gets back to you, that change is harder to roll with than if it had landed as less of a surprise.

Valuations are a great example here, because they can and do change for all sorts of reasons. A high-level valuation provided early in the transaction isn’t necessarily what you’ll see on heads of terms. If that change comes with no communication around it, it’ll obviously come as a shock.

Seeing it from a buyer’s perspective

Like I said, I genuinely don’t think that buyers are vindictive or enjoy wasting a seller’s time. Perhaps there are some school playground negotiation techniques going on here. Are they ‘treating sellers mean to keep them keen’, in case looking too interested has a price implication? That’s disappointing if it’s true, because if there’s a fair price being discussed between two parties who are willing to agree on it, then why play games?

Or perhaps they think it’s a buyer’s market? But I’d be surprised if there were really so many good opportunities in the pipeline that they can afford to let a bunch of good ones slip without it impacting them.

So maybe it really is just a process and people challenge (like communication within firms and improving our own subpar services, like end-of-month close). Most potential acquirers will have a standing M&A slot in C-Suite meetings, and that should be being used to discuss active deals without needing to find extra time in everyone’s busy diaries. But…maybe they’re still too time-poor? If that’s the case, I say this about firms and I’ll say it about acquirers: it’s not a good enough excuse.

Where do we end up?

Is selling a firm still worth it? 100%. 

To potential sellers, don’t let this put you off. If anything, take it as a reality check - something to manage your expectations and maybe even reassure you if and when you encounter poor communication during the M&A process. 

And you don’t have to be okay with it, either. If communication becomes so much of an issue that it risks killing the deal, then maybe let it? Trust me. I speak from experience when I say that another offer will come along. 

I wish more acquirers understood that they’re being assessed too. Sellers don’t have to sell to you. Your communication, or lack thereof, could be seen as a sign of things to come. Communication builds trust. And trust is essential between a buyer and a seller.

Next week I’ll be looking at ‘the trust equation’ and how firms earn or lose trust through credibility, reliability, and intimacy. If you know any acquirers in your network, why not get them to subscribe to The Naked Accountant before next Saturday and we’ll see if they take the hint?

Okay, let’s jump back into what flinder’s improved end-of-month close process looked like. Then we’ll look at how other firms can design their own faster month-end process too.

6. Pulled prepayments/accruals/depreciation work forward

Prepayments, accruals, and depreciation were looked at in Week 3 of every month. 

If you prepare the majority of your journals in advance, there’s far less scrambling around from one month to the next. Of course, you can’t do everything, but you can do some of the work.

Let’s take prepayments as an example. There’s no need to wait until the end of the month to action prepayments you’re already aware of (it’ll already be clear from previous months what’s being prepaid 10 months vs 11 months, and so on).

That goes for any prepayments that come in during the first three weeks of the month. Are you aware of it? Then action it. That way you’re only “trueing-up” up the last week of prepayments come month-end.

7. Operated a 3+1 on key reconciliations

It’s easy for reconciliations to slip. Discrepancies, data errors, missing documentation, or disputed amounts all need investigating and take time and effort to resolve. We learned that if you start this process earlier, you’ll be in a far better place come month-end.

Essentially, flinder’s practice was to run reconciliations on anything material in the balance sheet at the end of Week 3. Does it reconcile? If not, why not? Find out now, not later.

Again, you can simply run a roll forward for the remaining week in the month. It’s much simpler to close down a week’s worth of questions at a crunch period than a whole month’s.

8. Held a pre-close call

Each month, we met with clients just before the end of the month to discuss status and timeline; what we’ve completed, what we’re missing, and if there is anything from a business perspective we should be aware of that’ll give rise to any other provisions and accruals that’ll be needed. This makes it far easier for them to deliver what’s required on WD0 or WD1.

It’s basically a close call, but just held a few days earlier with more open questions. Not only is this a great communication practice to have with the client, but it troubleshoots issues and fills gaps so much quicker.

9. Prepped management reporting and commentary based on what we knew

In those pre-close meetings, we also ran through any important operational or business developments that had happened during the month. This is the sort of information you’ll need come month-end, but why wait until the very last working day, or even the start of the next month, to have that conversation? 

Even having a draft of the management commentary - something that’s open to edits and additions - makes the process more efficient.

10. Ran a period-end soft close

A ‘soft close’ gave clients indicative end-of-month numbers, with the caveat that certain gaps were yet to be filled and trued up. This mattered to flinder’s clients who had investors to report to. And, again, it was practice that instilled a culture of not waiting on information we already had - that’s so important if you want to condense your reporting cycles and get the full team’s buy in.

How to design a zero-close process for any firm

Like I said, the way we did it at flinder might not be right for every other firm. For example, the fact that we worked with SaaS, tech, and e-commerce brands made certain elements easier at speed. Although, we did work with a few professional service businesses too and we made it work for them.

But here’s how we designed the process; the same questions and considerations should apply to any firm.

What do clients want?

flinder’s client base needed timely, useful insight (in fact, it was our whole value proposition).

These insights might have been used to make key commercial decisions, or to prepare to share with investors and/or the board, where a deck should be shared in advance. Either way, waiting 3 or 4 weeks for management reporting wouldn’t be anywhere near real-time enough. So, that’s where we had to start. Our clients need answers fast. How do we make that happen?

Are we asking the right question?

Once we’d identified the client need, that changed the question we were asking ourselves.

Suddenly it was less “How do we deliver a set of monthly accounts?” 

And more “How do we deliver relevant insight faster?”

Sometimes that’s all it takes to make an existing process no longer fit for purpose.

How do our clients work already?

The accounting process should be designed around clients; we shape our work to best fit them, not the other way around.

If a client bills monthly, you can align reporting, invoicing, reconciliations, and deferred/accrued revenue to match that rhythm. flinder’s subscription-heavy clients benefited from predictable MRR, making them a good fit for zero-day close.

How can we reduce the client’s uncertainty?

Waiting doesn’t have to be painful for clients.

I touched on this in my recent newsletter, ‘Why even the best accountants can still lose clients to poor communication’, but the same applies here. Even if the firm is working hard on month-end behind the scenes, the client should know what’s happening and when. What are you doing now, what’s going to happen next, and how long will all of that take?

There are several ways you can build this into the process, and technology can help (like automated updates into a Slack channel when a task is completed).

Think about the whole experience, not just the output

I like the questions above because they encourage us to think about month-end as much more than final management accounts.

Month-close is the whole journey from invoicing to collections and reconciliations, from review to commentary, and delivery and communication. That gives a firm tonnes of opportunities to make the experience better for clients. If you can put yourself in the client’s shoes and design the process around their reality, you’ll soon see the benefits.

Next up: continuous close?

Zero-day close is a good ambition for firms to have today. But continuous close could be the next big leap forward, as long as technology continues to improve the way we expect it to.

After all, we’re edging nearer to being able to give clients a materially correct P&L at any moment during the month, even if a true continuous close is still some way off. 

What would need to be in effect for a continuous close? Some of the below for a start:

• Invoices fetched, chased, extracted and posted autonomously

• Ledgers reconciled automatically

• Payroll and depreciation journals to be approximated/automated

• Prepayments automated with well-tagged data

• Revenue systems to be continuous with clean data and systems.

• And some way of capturing provisions directly mid-month (accruals, revenue recognition and other provisions).

Like with zero-day close, a continuous close becomes much more possible with the right process design. And it’s becoming that bit more realistic with new technologies available.

I might be getting ahead of myself here actually, as some of that list of requirements above is feeling a little ambitious (without errors). But if flinder could close by WD3 without AI a few years ago, I’d be really interested to hear if any firms today are narrowing in on zero-day and even continuous close. Have you heard of any?

A slow reporting pattern is common in many firms. 

Common and hard to break free from. Firms are left chasing their tails each month because you can’t get ahead on September’s reporting when you’re still catching up with August (or even July).

Your business and its clients suffer when the process is this protracted; it isn’t convenient or enjoyable for anyone. Is it a stretch to say that end-of-month reporting can be a delightful experience? Maybe. But it could certainly be less frustrating and more rewarding. All it really takes is switching the focus from ‘How it’s always been done’ to ‘What makes for a better customer experience?’.

In my view, several factors converge to slow end-of-month reporting down: 

• The process needs reimagining

• People (including clients) can be disorganised

• Not enough communication is happening (between teams and with the client)

• Data is often disjointed

• And technology can be a limiter.

Process has to be top of that list because a zero-day or reduced close hangs on it. 

Fix the process, and you’ve got something new for people to adopt (the next challenge is bringing people along on the journey). Your data will naturally need cleaning up or organising to deliver that process, and it’ll become clear what technology you need and what technology you don’t (and what can help speed up a people process when there are high volumes of data involved).

You might have seen OpenAI’s CFO recently proclaim that they were going to make the zero-day close possible, but at its core, it’s not a technology problem to solve. Largely all it takes is a better process - and that’s been an option for firms long before OpenAI came along.

How do I know this? Because I know companies who’ve done it. 

Cisco, for example, managed to close and report within 48 hours of its year-end, and that was a $20 billion revenue business over 20 years ago. In addition to that, we (me and my team at PwC NL) were able to report our opinion to the PwC US team within another 48-hour window after that.

If it was possible there, I knew it would be possible for flinder and our clients. And it’ll be possible for your firm too.

If, like I was, you’re dissatisfied with how you’re working with clients and how hectic the month-end feels, these are just some of the changes we implemented to make monthly reporting faster. And this list excludes anything AI-related. It’s a list of requirements that any firm could pick up and run with if it’s ready to change.

We:

1. Changed the mindset to pull work forward within the month (not after)

2. Increased bank reconciliation frequency

3. Communicated clearly and timely of open items

4. Condensed (documented and shared) close calendar and timeline

5. Worked with operations to speed up sales invoicing

6. Pulled accruals/prepayments/depreciation work forward

7. Operated a 3+1 on key reconciliations

8. Held a pre-close call

9. Prepped management reporting and commentary based on what we knew

10. Ran a period-end soft close

The first 5 of these I’ll go through in detail in this newsletter. In Part 2 (next week for subscribers, I’ll cover the other 5, and I’ll also unpack how we got there. These considerations can help firms find their own reduced close solution if what we did at flinder doesn’t feel like a fit.

A look inside flinder’s close process

1. Changed the mindset to pull work forward within the month (not after)

As a firm, we had to change how we looked at month-end closes. The unbreakable cycle of falling behind is largely cultural - and it starts when it’s the 1st of May and you’re only just starting to look at April.

As the firm’s leaders, Luke and I challenged every team member that worked on a client to question their process. Why was work being left until the end of the month? Could it be done earlier? We wanted an incontestable reason for anything that wasn’t being brought forward.

I think this was a key factor in taking our month-end close from WD12/15 to WD5. It set the tone for how serious we were about improving and made the changes below successful.

2. Increased bank reconciliation frequency

Doing near real-time accounting work requires a higher frequency of reconciliation. flinder did weekly bank recs as standard - and sometimes more frequently than that for more complex clients. That way, by month-end, only the last day or two was left to reconcile. We do hear of some firms doing daily bank recs, but I think there’s a balance depending on client needs, volume of data, other services you’re providing, and a few other factors.

Critically, we also chased clients within the month for any outstanding documentation or explanations. If you’re ending the month with a long list of missing information, it’s no wonder your process gets slowed down.

3. Clear and timely communication of open items

Earlier, I listed poor communication as one of the factors that slows a close time down. Fixing this requires a little bit of process redesign and a little bit of people management.

We trained the flinder team on the importance of communication for a fast month-end close; everyone knew to jump on missing documentation or open items as soon as they became aware. We shared a Slack channel (another advantage of serving a niche is they tend to use the same tools) with most clients, so an update or request was only a quick message away. 

Other communication channels that worked for us included a weekly ‘final chaser’ call for urgent information needed and circulating a list of open items with a name of someone at the client’s end allocated to each.

4. Condensed (documented and shared) close calendar and timeline

Most SMEs report 3 to 4 weeks after the end of the month (or later). But when you’ve done as much of the work in advance as you can, that timeline can be condensed right down. At flinder, the final review and delivery could happen almost immediately within the first week (by WD5). I think WD2 was the fastest we ever did it!

We made clients aware of the timeline and worked with them to better understand their process. Doing so meant we could separate what could be done ahead of time from what needed to be left for an end-of-month top-up.

5. Worked with operations to speed up sales invoicing

Generally, the financial information needed from clients falls into two categories: costs and revenue. Again, generally, revenue varies from client to client a little more than the purchase invoice process, which becomes more fluid throughout the month.

Depending on who your client is (and the sector they’re in), their sales invoices can be one of the challenges that goes beyond the end of the month. Again, it’s unsurprising if your client is invoicing based on work completed compared to, say, an e-commerce or SaaS business. Or on  a non-working-capital-efficient project/timesheet basis, rather than on retainer. The issues could be as simple as lack of a slick system for raising invoices.

We worked with clients to shorten the time it took to raise invoices and focused on the full order-to-cash process, not just accounting entries. We also helped clients improve collections.

Firms know that payment methods like GoCardless, Adfin, direct debit, and payment on account make collection so much smoother. Clients don’t always know this though, and it’s our job to help reduce the lag between invoice issuance and cash collection.

This is a total win-win for clients: improving their working capital while speeding up reporting.

I've been guesting on more podcasts recently (and after 5 years of talking about it, I’m soon to launch my own, probably). All this has got me thinking about how much I get from speaking.

I don’t mean financially (more often than not, I’m speaking for free). But the less tangible returns like brand building, challenging and shaping my perspective, and having a good time! 

Firms have something to gain from speaking events too. I’d really encourage leaders who have a natural aptitude for public speaking to go and try it out. 

Like how I find that speaking events bring me clarity on how I think and feel about a topic (discussing purpose as a founder, for example, or whether we’ll serve agentic clients in the future), firms can achieve the same. To be invited to speak on a topic, you typically need a clear opinion, perhaps even a provocative one. This is an opportunity to talk about your firm’s brand, mission, or purpose - what are you doing differently, why, and how does that benefit clients? Your thoughts will get clearer and tighter on this the more you discuss it.

Then there’s the exposure, of course. Speaking gets the firm’s name out there and in front of potential clients or investors.

But it requires a strategic approach: what opportunities you say yes to, when you say no, what you agree to speak on, what your motivation is, and what you hope to gain. 

Because speaking at events or on podcasts isn’t easy. It’s mentally taxing. It requires preparation. And it’s always a bit of a challenge, no matter how many events you’ve got under your belt.

I’ve lost track of how many speaking events I’ve done between conferences, panels, podcasts, and other interviews. Maybe 100+? And what I’ve learned is that it always goes better if you:

1. Define your purpose

2. Only speak on topics you’re confident discussing

3. Think about what the audience should take away

4. Just be human!

If you’re looking to speak publicly at your first event or want to ramp up your events activity, that’s what I’d focus on first.

1. Define your purpose

If your goal is to be invited to speak at an event - any event - then you might be tempted to say ‘yes’ to any opportunity to get your foot in the door. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but it’s comparable to taking on any and every client in a firm’s early days: if you’re not careful, the cost-benefit ratio quickly gets out of whack.

Ask yourself why you want to get into speaking. 

• Is it to build your personal brand?

• Do you have a unique or contrarian viewpoint you’re passionate about sharing?

• Are you seeing it as a new business or lead generation tool for the firm?

• Is it to drive recruitment?

• Do you want to ‘give back’ to the profession by reflecting on your years in practice and sharing what you’ve learned?

These are all great reasons to get behind the microphone. And being clear on your motivation will help you filter out the opportunities that make the most sense for you. Because you’ve only got so much time and, really, speaking should always come second to your day job of running the firm.

Take it from me: don’t underestimate how much time a speaking engagement takes up. These days, I only ever do interviews, fireside chats, or speak on or host panels. I won’t do solo presentations anymore due to the hours of planning and rehearsal.

2. Only speak on topics you’re confident discussing

Here’s another reason to learn to say no. 

If you say yes to all speaking invitations, it’ll only be a matter of time before you end up on a panel or in a room where you feel under-qualified to speak on the topic or just plain disinterested. Neither scenario is a good use of your time.

So be selective. Have a roster of topics you’re keen to speak on and stick to them. This should help you avoid any awkward silences or squirming in your proverbial chair (although, as I said, every speaking event is a challenge in some way and speakers have to get used to feeling under pressure!). 

Being selective also avoids you being seen as ‘that person who’s always speaking at events’. Our industry is only so big and as the old saying goes: it’s better to leave them wanting more.

3. Think about what the audience should take away

I once went to an improv class (yes, really!) and it totally transformed how I thought about communication and speaking. 

In the class, we were given one passage of text and asked to deliver it in three different ways, to give our audience three different experiences. The lesson was that content can be conveyed however you choose: you can leave people feeling motivated, moved, worried, or whatever else - it’s all in the delivery. 

PwC were also pretty hot on communication skills (I’ll talk about how this has impacted my work in another newsletter soon). I enrolled on several presentation skills courses during my time there, going through the - often agonising but always insightful - process of presenting to camera and watching the footage back. Even today I still self-critique my event recording and see how I could improve. (Yes, I watch or listen to nearly all the events or pods I’ve been on to continually improve!)

Because even if brand-building is your primary goal, you’re speaking for the audience and not just to them. Think about who they are (this dictates the content you’ll share) and what you want them to feel (this dictates how you communicate).

It’s a juggling act, and that’s what makes it hard. In any one moment on a shared ‘stage’, you’ll find yourself:

• Listening to what the person or people you’re speaking to are saying 

• Thinking about what to say in response that helps build the conversation

• Asking yourself whether the audience cares about what’s being discussed and how to make the session as valuable as it can be

• Keeping an eye on the clock to see how much time you’ve got left.

Even in solo presentations and keynotes, you’re not there to be the smartest person in the room. You’re there for the audience. So facilitate, don’t dominate.

Digital Accountancy Show - balancing talking, interviewing and drawing on the mainstage!

4. Just be human

I recently found out that Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar acceptance speech for The Revenant (in 2016) is the most-watched acceptance video by far, with 60+ million views versus the second most-watched (Matthew McConaughey in 2014) at 35 million. 

We could discuss the reasons why, but I’d be surprised if his story and struggle to secure an Oscar doesn’t have something to do with it (he’d famously been nominated and lost five times before his win in 2016). He also uses his speech to speak passionately about climate change and his personal experience with it. 

My take-out is this: audiences don’t buy tickets or access content to engage with a product, they want to engage with a person.

And people are fallible. Even DiCaprio trips up a little.

You will stumble and mess up. You’ll lose your train of thought. Your microphone might even cut out. But the show must go on, and audiences are far more forgiving than you’d think.

Being real appeals to the audience - even if that means admitting you can’t remember the question you were asked once you’ve started answering (which I often do). 

These days, I actually prefer going into a fireside chat or panel without rehearsing. It’s easy to come across as too rehearsed: scripted and stiff. I’d rather the energy on stage was the raw energy of people bouncing off each other for the first time. The first answer you give to a question is usually the best and most engaging version of that answer, even if it’s not ‘perfect’.

And the more speaking events you sign up to on similar topics, the more likely you are to shift into autopilot. There’s nothing human about that and audiences see right through it.

Ready to be mic’d up?

If I haven’t scared you out of it, and I really hope I haven’t, you might now be wondering how to book your first speaking event 

I’d say self-nominate. I’m pretty sure that my first speaking event outside of PwC was Accountex, maybe a year or two after founding flinder. Accountex welcomes pitches (usually around December/January for Accountex London), plus you don’t need experience. You will need a compelling proposal, though: I based mine on flinder’s point of difference and our proven methodology.

After that event, more doors started to open. And I quickly learned the value of filtering my invites! I hope the same happens for you.

Is there such a thing as ‘too responsive’? I don’t think so, especially when you’re replying to clients and prospects. There could be a few people reading this who are waiting on a WhatsApp response from me (sorry), but flinder was always run with a ‘Reply now’ frame of mind.

We live in a culture of instant gratification. Same-day Amazon delivery. Thousands of TV shows available on-demand. But even before then, no one’s ever enjoyed being left waiting or being left out of the loop.

And it’s bad for business. Twenty years ago, Google tried increasing the number of search results it displayed from 10 to 30. This added 0.5 seconds to the loading time and caused a 20% drop in traffic.

Waiting is an annoyance that we share. And that’s why I think there’s little excuse for it at work. I’d encourage all firms to think about their communication policy and what they expect from teams. People won’t automatically share the same values as you (and you can’t exactly ask people at interview how fast they reply to emails - although you do get a sense of their responsiveness during the recruitment process). If you want a certain practice to be adopted company-wide, you need to make it policy.

flinder once lost a client because we weren’t meeting them where they were (I’ll talk about that in depth later). So, to me, this is something that can’t be undervalued.

How we built flinder’s rapid-replying culture

We talk about empathy and being empathetic to a client’s needs, but how would you feel if your email went ‘ignored’ for days? 

I say ‘ignored’ because often there’s legwork that needs to be done from a client query. We could receive a request and start actioning it right away. But if we’ve not sent a reply, that client is still left in the dark. They don’t know you’ve opened an investigation or are looking for the right literature to give them an answer - not unless you tell them. 

That’s something we stressed to the whole flinder team. Over-communicate if you have to. It’s great that you’ve been able to grab 15 minutes of a CFO / partner’s time later this week, because usually they’re back-to-back. But if you’ve still not pinged the client a quick response to say that you’re on it, then you’ve missed the easiest win.

Behavioural science teaches us that people don’t mind waiting as long as they know how long they can expect to wait. It’s the uncertainty that does the damage. That’s why apps like Uber and Deliveroo give transparent pick-up/delivery windows and real-time driver locations.

There’s too much uncertainty in the accounting clients’ customer experience. In fact, firms aren’t great at communication on the whole. And that creates an opportunity. 

Firms who can get this right can build a competitive advantage. Did flinder’s rapid-replying culture make us better at account management? I think it certainly helped build trust and drive loyalty (our logo retention sat close to 100% month after month for years).

Results like that helped get team buy-in around the value of responsiveness. But reinforcing that culture was still a top-down effort; we laid out timeliness as a priority in our communication strategy, which I’d take new hires through in their first week, and was always available to everyone via Notion. 

We even designed a prototype to show clients real-time updates on their monthly management accounts. Was the bookkeeping done? Had we finished reconciliations? Was the management commentary written but waiting for review? We never ended up building it, but that pet project helped make clear to the team how important this was to the business.

Now I think I might have particularly high standards here (I’ll thank my years at PwC for that, as client service excellence was doctrine there). But there will be a version of this that works at every firm.

How flinder lost a client due to poor communication

Timeliness isn’t everything when it comes to client communication. 

You can be fast, but you also need to be clear.

Give clients a clear update on what’s happening and what to expect next, but say it in their language - not necessarily the language of the accountant.

As accountants, we can all be guilty of speaking in jargon. Some accountants do it just to sound smart. But it’s often a sure-fire way to exclude your audience and bring up more questions than answers. 

That’s how we lost a client: we hadn’t appreciated the imbalance between how we talked about the work and how they understood it. We weren’t being empathetic. They left the firm because we made them feel, well the opposite to smart. They didn’t understand the words we were using and what we were actually saying. We could have so easily adapted our language to better fit theirs. Hard to apply in practice, but more than worth it.

This is an area where firms who serve a specific sector or customer profile can really excel. When you become the expert in accounting for e-commerce, for example, you learn the language of the industry. And you can use that to your advantage to serve clients better.

These are just two examples of how communication can make a firm more valuable. I’d be interested to hear what your firm’s communication policy is and where you’re seeing returns?

My recent newsletter, ‘Everyone says AI will replace accountants. The economics say otherwise’, clearly struck a chord - it was great to have so many of you reply and share your thoughts.

As an industry, we’re right to be looking for actual evidence of accountants losing their jobs to AI (and not just getting swept up in the sensationalist narrative). The idea that humans are also probabilistic (i.e. capable of making mistakes and not always right) is something we agree on too - and is the ‘echo chamber’ effect of assuming that clients want firms to use AI more (ultimately, we’re paid to serve their needs).

Some examples of feedback from “AI replace accountants - the economics say otherwise” newsletter.

Few people have as analytical and pragmatic a view on AI in accounting today as Damon Anderson. His ongoing work for the A to Z of AI Accounting Software provides an independent view on 300+ vendors to “help people navigate the massive noise around accounting software - let alone AI. And give buyers real insights into the evidence of what each product does.” 

So much AI software marketing is inflated. There’s no shortage of tools advertising themselves as ‘AI-powered’, ‘AI native’, or ‘AI driven’. But what does that actually mean? When we cut through the spin and marketing fluff, even more reasons why AI won’t replace accountants any time soon start to emerge:

1. If accountants disappear, clients take on the work

2. The firm is just one player in the wider accounting landscape

3. The market simply isn’t ready

4. AI won’t go to jail for you if you get something wrong.

Here’s a rundown of each from my conversation with Damon…

1. If accountants disappear, clients take on the work

At the moment, no tool exists that can completely replace the role of the accountant. And even if and when it did, every new tool or platform a client needs to use only creates work at their end. That in itself should be enough of a barrier to keep the profession safe for now.

“All products require cognitive load to adopt,” says Damon, “and any solution would need to be adopted by small businesses - businesses outside our ‘bubble’ of people on the cutting edge of accounting AI, where AI adoption is low.”

Plus, think about the migration process. How complex and time-consuming would it be to take all the data, all the insights, all the knowledge from a firm and pass it to a platform that replaces the accountant and totally ends their involvement? This becomes even harder when individual accountants within the firm have personal relationships with the client and/or deliver a service that’s further up the value chain (another argument for why advisory might be less vulnerable to an AI takeover).

But not only that, if we pull back and think of the industry of accounting, not just the role of the accountant, how plausible is it that one single product could do it all?

2. The firm is just one player in the wider accounting landscape 

“The category at large is huge: accountants, clients, infrastructure, government. There’s no single solution that can ever come along and completely unpick that on a timescale that’s going to drop the market and completely disband accountants.” That’s Damon’s view.

AI can perform activities, processes, and workflows that fit within a nice, standard structure. But the wider accounting landscape is so much more than that. There are human relationships (client to accountant), business relationships (banks, investors, and other funders), and stakeholders such as HMRC. Plus all the regulations. AI can’t deal with all that complexity right now; it works best on a non-exception basis.

Could a tool come along that delivers one aspect of the role well enough to automate it on our behalf? Yes, probably. We’re already seeing the start of that with Ravical’s advisory tool (I haven’t used it yet, but my flinder co-founder Luke raves about it for surfacing new client opportunities).

But AI performing the whole remit of the job from end-to-end and all the ancillary stuff in between? It’s unlikely.

3. The market simply isn’t ready

Damon compares the accounting AI hype to other ‘almost’ moments in the past: “Remember when VR had that big boom 10+ years ago? The market didn’t accept it. It didn’t need it. It didn’t want it.” So even if disbanding the need for accountants was technically possible soon, he doesn’t believe the market is ready.

“The role of the accountant is going to change massively,” he accepts. “We’re not going to be needed to do a lot of the back-office number crunching we used to. But there are a lot of people who don’t want to be in the front office! Their brains don’t work like that.”

I’ve written a lot about the changing role of accountants - say, for example, whether it’s a full-blown eventuality that all accountants will need to know coding in the future. I do believe that certain skills will become more valuable and more commercial as the industry shifts. But as to the sort of timeline we’re on for that…who can really say?

After all, “the accounting industry has to buy into the software that’s coming. You’d need the whole industry to adopt it, and it’s a slow adoption curve.”

4. AI won’t go to jail for you if you get something wrong

This 1979 statement from IBM featured in a Naked Accountant AI newsletter last year: “A computer can never be held accountable.”

That’s exactly Damon’s point too. 

Right now, most clients would probably still prefer a human handling their account - especially if they’re further behind on the AI adoption curve. But there’s the liability requirement as well. “The AI isn’t going to jail for you if you fuck your books up”, Damon warns. “There’s always a human at the end of every decision that needs to be made.”

So until there’s regulation and standards regarding auditability and traceability - to a level that clients, insurers, and government are all satisfied with - the accountant’s role is safe. And while the tech could advance at pace, “the regulatory clock is a slow one, and it’ll take a while.”

There’s just one caveat to add, and it’s a pretty big one: humans are terrible at predicting the future. 

Cognitive biases get in our way, like linear projection (assuming our future preferences will mirror a linear evolution of what we want today) and end-of-history illusion (where we might be able to acknowledge how much has changed in the past, but still discount how much we’ll change in the future).

“The future is changing faster than we've ever seen before”, Damon agrees. “My trust in Claude has improved so much in such a short time. A year ago, people were only using ChatGPT for recipes!” So, who really knows what could happen next?

For me, my experience of AI changes almost daily. One day, I’m sat back in my chair in awe, thinking it’s the best thing since sliced bread. The next day I’m struggling to get it to complete one simple task. For this and all the reasons above, plus the economic theory I've shared before, I don’t think firms need to worry about shutting up shop yet.

But these are the conversations we need to have. We know change is coming. The future of our industry will be more automated, whatever that looks like, and technology will play a bigger role. I’d love to hear your thoughts again on what you predict.

Thank you to Damon Anderson, founder of the A to Z of AI Accounting, for his contribution to this newsletter.

We’re all customers of a product or service. And we’ve all had customer experiences - both good and bad. How many of us have cut ties with a brand because the customer experience was poor? Or switched to a different company because their reputation was better?

We know, first-hand, that customer experience matters. We’ve all made choices based on it, in our work and personal lives. So why isn’t our industry more attuned to how clients experience our firms?

I’ve got a few theories. For one, accountants have been trained to follow how things have always been done. The qualification doesn’t ask us to challenge, and a lot of the practice is retrospective - looking at what happened last month or last year - rather than looking ahead. Customer, or client, experience is also one of those fluffy concepts. Like brand, it’s intangible. And accountants are far more comfortable with concepts that are easy to define.

I’d also bet that most firms think more about what works for them than what works for their client base. Firms build systems for speed and efficiency. We’ve got deadlines to hit on behalf of clients, but we’re still taking the path of least resistance to get there - and asking ‘Could this be done better?’ requires reflection, time, and energy.

But by overlooking the customer experience, firms overlook an opportunity. It could even lose you business.

Customer experience in 60 seconds

Customer experience (CX) is the overall perception a client has of the firm across all their interactions with it. CX spans the entire client lifecycle, from first impressions of a firm to engaging with the team and their eventual off-boarding.

Every touchpoint across the journey shapes how a client feels and determines their long-term loyalty.

CX is different from customer service. It’s proactive, not reactive. 

CX is also different from account management, which is more function-focused.

CX is hard to pin down because it’s embedded in everything the firm does. It’s in the values you set and how you enact them; the people you hire and how they engage with the work, each other, and, of course, their clients. It’s even driven by the office space you operate from and the vibe that clients get when they step through the doors. It’s your background on a Teams call and the time it takes to reply to an email.

They say ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. But a firm’s customer experience could well be broken. Just because it’s always been done this way doesn’t mean that it’s done well (in fact, I’d argue that if CX isn’t something the firms ever thought hard about before, you’d be lucky to be nailing it by accident). Finding out means stepping away from the desk and taking the time to ask.

How do we know that CX matters in accounting?

Like I said before, we’re all customers of something and so are our clients. We all spend our money somewhere. How we choose who to buy from is where it gets interesting.

I won’t go deep into the psychology of spending and consumer behaviour, but I will say that we know that CX has value. 

On a purely rational level, many products and services would give us the same result. All airlines promise to get you from A to B. So why pick one airline over another? Price, sure. But customer experience as well. If you want to fly cheap to Europe, you’ll fly with Ryanair. If you want to fly well, you’ll fly with BA. 

We should compare the customer experience of our firms with other verticals, like airlines, because that’s what clients will do. They won’t only think of your level of service in relation to another accounting firm - until they’ve already moved on and it’s too late!

If other businesses are investing in CX, which they are. Then accounting firms need to as well, or risk losing clients as a result.

4 levers of customer experience in a firm

Given that CX relates to the full experience of working with a firm, it helps to break it down into basic ingredients or levers:

• People

• Proposition

• Processes

• Brand

Each overlaps and interplays. So when it comes to designing or revisiting the customer experience, a firm can start by narrowing down on one before moving to the next.

People: employee experience shapes customer experience

Peter Ellington has been working on the customer experience of his firm, Triple Bottom Line Accounting, for years. To Peter, “your people are your product”; they are the ones delivering it to clients day-to-day. 

Typically speaking, the better the employee experience, the better the customer experience.

Highly engaged teams create:

• 10% higher customer loyalty and ratings

• 18% higher turnover (in high turnover organisations)

• 43% higher turnover (in low turnover organisations).

Good managers, fair pay, training and development, flexible working - all of the ‘benefits’ you’d expect help build employee engagement. But the values and culture of the firm are essential too.

Peter asks “people to bring their whole selves to work” and tries hard to understand their individual differences and preferences in terms of working environment and tasks. He knows who’s a ‘blue’ and who’s a ‘red’, and what that means in the context of the firm.

For me, how you communicate values has a big impact here as well. Internally at flinder, we were always talking about and coming back to the firm’s mission, vision, and values. Peter’s done something similar with his firm and is super-clear on the how, what, and why of what the firm does and wants to do. For new hires, “they’re with me every day in their first week”, Peter explains; there’s a big emphasis on sharing the culture and embedding the values. 

The more people are connected to that, the better positioned they are to deliver it to clients.

Of course, this links to who you hire for your firm. As I’ve talked about many times before: we shouldn’t just hire accountants based on their hard skills, but who they are, how they work, and why they’re right for your firm.

Proposition: what you do and why you do it

A value proposition sets the tone for what a customer’s experience should be. 

If we go back to the Ryanair v BA example, Ryanair is all about low fares and no frills. It’s designed for price-sensitive flyers, with cost-based ticket fees. BA, on the other hand, offers a full-service flight option. Its pricing is value-based; you may pay more per mile of travel, but for many people that’s worth it. And you should expect to have a nicer end-to-end experience when flying with BA.

Like air travel, a lot of accounting is standardised: there’s only one way to file a VAT return, right? 

But firms that prioritise the customer experience will naturally look for ways to make the offer more enjoyable, engaging, or valuable for clients. Like at flinder, where our proposition was to go behind the numbers and give those numbers meaning. That wasn’t something that other firms were offering at the time. The fact that we could deliver actionable insights to help our clients grow positioned us more like a BA than a no-frills budget airline. Similar journey, very different experience.

Processes: how you do what you do

This lever helps bring things back down to earth for a moment. I said before that most firms are built for efficiency. The systems, the processes, the software - it all helps us work faster and do more with less, to drive margin up.

But what if that wasn’t the best way for clients?

Sometimes, we need to step back and challenge the way we’ve been working for its relevance and value to the people we serve. Often, doing so will bring measurable ROI for the firm and a better experience for customers.

For example, Peter’s been working with his son (an engineer) to build a new client-facing platform that changes the customer experience around proposals and onboarding. But what works for Peter’s clients also works for Peter’s firm: any efficiency gained in creating and sending proposals is time saved for Peter’s team, while also improving the client’s experience (and boosting conversion rates!). The same for onboarding: a slick process builds confidence among clients but also removes friction at the firm’s back-end.

Brand: the promise you make to the market

Brand is another of those golden threads that runs through all a firm’s activities. But it’s worth separating out on its own here when talking about CX. Why? Because brand is often the first encounter prospects have with a firm, whether that’s a website, a LinkedIn post, or just a sticker you’ve slapped on your laptop. 

Ultimately, that first impression makes a promise about a company’s CX. It’s why consistency is so important in brand design; an inconsistent brand suggests an inconsistent and untrustworthy experience. 

The colour of your office walls? That’s branding. And how your teams engage with clients, the way you talk about your offer to the market, the language you use, and the processes you follow - it’s all brand personality in action.

How to design a better customer experience

What do clients want from their accountants?

Why does anyone pay anyone to do anything for them? To solve a problem.

So the basic question that firms should ask themselves when (re)evaluating their CX is: how can we solve our clients’ problem(s) better?

The answer might be doing it faster, for less money, or offering something altogether new. The process could also be made more delightful or unexpected in some way. At flinder, we helped clients evaluate financial scenarios to make better informed decisions (and look more informed in front of investors), using that data to drive growth.

Your firm knows its clients best, so I can’t give you a straight-up solution to improve your CX and better meet clients’ needs. But I can give you a template to follow to identify the ‘moments that matter’: the opportunities you’ve got to improve the service and build client loyalty.

Airline customer experience touchpoints

When price is the main differentiating factor between businesses, there’s only one way to go when you want to compete. Building a great customer experience avoids that race to the bottom. And done well enough, it can make a firm untouchable.

Thank you to Peter Ellington, founder and CEO of Triple Bottom Line Accounting, for his contribution to this newsletter.

I think in the pursuit of growth, we sometimes forget that revenue = the number of clients you’ve got x the price per client. And that bringing in new clients isn’t the only way to grow.

Firms have some influence over the first half of the formula above, even if that influence isn’t always best utilised. What I mean is, firms can proactively market themselves and drive business development. But Sales isn’t where most accountants feel comfortable, so new business is often something that happens to a firm (through referrals) rather than something that happens because of their direct efforts.

When it comes to the second half of the revenue equation, firms have more control than many believe:

• You set the price of your services (within reason and within the constraints of price elasticity).

• You can deepen the scope of a client’s work to increase the value of the account (and your average contract value/ACV).

• You can choose to stop working with clients if they’re costing you too much in opportunity cost of time (or don’t want to pay your fees).

There’s plenty to be gained from improving the price per client of clients you already have. And so the firm grows through value, not through volume - like we did at flinder. Okay, we also grew through volume, of course, as we started with zero clients. But value is how we grew fast.

At first, flinder undercharged

flinder’s fees were initially based on the experience Luke and I had at PwC. We didn’t want to be influenced by other firms in the market, as we were offering something different. But we also felt we couldn’t quite charge as much as PwC because we weren’t a well-known name. 

Where we landed gave us a blended average per client of around £950/month - a figure we quickly realised didn’t match the value we delivered. 

Within just a few years, flinder was turning £2 million in revenue. We would have needed upwards of 170 clients at £950/month to hit that revenue goal. And handling clients at that volume wouldn’t have been workable for us given the deep relationships and meaningful insights we promised to deliver.

So we increased our fees (and did so often!). Over time, we 2.5x-ed our fees, in fact, to achieve an ACV of around £2500/month for a very similar scope of work.

We also increased the value of each account. There was more that our firm could offer to clients. And by using Account Planning Workshops, we found ways to broaden and deepen our offer, making ourselves more valuable to clients and harder to walk away from.

There are many reasons we didn’t chase volume…

It wasn’t just that volume couldn’t carry us to our revenue goal. Growing through volume can also cost you and be a real burden to bear.

Every new client is another onboarding workflow, another set of basic requirements and fixed tasks (annual accounts, reports, depending on what your firm does), even just another person/team to communicate with and field requests from.

We knew we wanted to be agile. And the longer your client list, the more friction you add to the firm. Fewer, higher-paying clients have less demand on capacity, meaning you have more time to innovate (while also generating margin). 

Sometimes, volume will simply be incompatible with your firm’s proposition. Luke and I knew we wanted flinder to be an insights-first business - we became a regulated accounting firm as a way of achieving that, rather than accounting being our core proposition. If you’re spread too thin over too many clients, there’s a risk to the quality of relationship you can build with every account. We took pride in knowing our clients’ visions, strategy, and challenges - we wanted to understand their businesses inside-out. That couldn’t have been done at the volume end of the service spectrum.

A business model that’s built to process volume needs incredibly slick and standardised processes to avoid inefficiencies.

These models do exist, though. Like the ‘vending machine’ firm we discussed at Finance Takes The Piste. Volume can absolutely be a growth lever if you’ve got a standardised offer that’s easily replicable, and if you can use AI and/or offshore teams to deliver around the clock.

And you can’t deny the benefits of not ‘putting all your eggs in one basket’...

There are risks to manage when growing through value

It’s easy to look at a £30k ARR client through rose-tinted glasses. You don’t need many of those to break a million.

But every high-paying client you can lose would take a huge chunk of margin with them. That leaves gaps that are hard and stressful to fill, especially in the early days. It’s an offshore team member’s salary and then some, so it can really impact your cashflow.

A growth model that relies on signing a small number of big-ticket clients looks lumpy and unreliable on revenue graphs too. This matters for your exit strategy (which it’s never too early to think about!) and if the firm is seeking investment. 

Acquirers and investors both want evidence of predictable future revenue. There’s something to be said for having a greater number of clients with a smaller ACV - that definitely makes for a smoother, steadier line.

Plus, how do you plan capacity when your growth strategy is based on new clients worth £30k? That’s a lot of value to service and it’s not easy to hit that sweet spot between being under- or over-capacity. Good people are an expensive resource to have; you don’t want to hire too far ahead and then leave talent on the bench.

Growing the number of clients isn’t the only option you’ve got

It’s simply not true that to grow, you have to win new clients.

Both growing through volume and growing through value have their challenges. But I’m still a big advocate of the latter, as we saw it work at flinder.

If growth is on your firm’s agenda, why not challenge your thinking by asking:

Can we better serve our clients today?

I mentioned Account Planning Workshops (APWs) above. These sessions help you develop a deeper understanding of your client base and identify new ways to support them and grow the value of the account.

There are three exercises I like to do in an APW:

• Pain points and propositions - Name 2-3 decision-makers in the client account; brainstorm their pain points (personal and professional); get to the true heart of each pain point so you’re clear on the problem to solve; do you already have a service that answers this need or is a new proposition required?

• Vision statements - Take a small number of the pain points identified and practice writing a customer-facing story to sell it into their business.

• Stakeholder heat mapping - Convert your ideas into action by ending with a map of who firm-side is best placed to explore the appetite for these new services at the client’s end.

Read more about these three exercises and how to run them here: Looking to grow existing clients? These are the exercises I rate.

Is there a different customer we could target?

You don’t have to change your offer to sell it at a higher price. For example, compliance is inherently more complex for a multi-entity business. The same can be true for bigger organisations or clients with more complex needs.

Try to divorce yourself from cost-based pricing and consider: what is our support worth to them?

Depending on the clients you choose, you can see growth in price through the client’s natural growth trajectory too. A fast-growing business that you start working with at £1,000/month can be worth £2,000 in 12 months, and £3,000 12 months after that. 

Try selecting clients that you can grow your fees with as they grow their business.

Is it time to increase our pricing?

I’d pretty much always answer yes! We can’t be afraid to defend the value of our firms - and be okay with losing or even firing clients who don’t see or can’t find the budget for the value of what we do.

Letting clients go is a tricky concept for any business leader to get their head around. But it’s got to be done if they’re dragging your ACV down or jeopardising margin. 

There might be one or two of these ‘vampires’ sat hidden in your portfolio. Increasing your fees is a great way to tease them out.

And think of it this way: if you lose 10% of your clients because your fees went up by 20%, that’s still a win! You’ve consolidated your client base, freed up some capacity, and you’re no worse off for it. Now what can you use that extra time and resource for?

It feels like you can’t open LinkedIn these days without seeing a news story proclaiming the death of one industry or another at the hands of AI.

Bloomberg recently reported that AI-related layoffs in the US financial activities and information sectors have accelerated in 2026 - now averaging 28,000 job losses per month, according to government data.

Accounting is an AI-exposed occupation, sure. But in what way? I just can’t agree with such deterministic statements as that of Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, who said: "So white-collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer - either being, you know, a lawyer, or an accountant, or a project manager, or a marketing person - most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months."

I think he’s oversimplifying something he’s not qualified to talk about. He might be an authority on AI, but how much does he know about the accounting profession?

Let’s be honest about where we are today

The majority of accounting firms are just beginning their AI journey. 

I caught up with Billie Mcloughlin a few weeks back, who made the point that those of us talking about and using AI the most are in an echo chamber online. We’re connected with and following other people who lean in as much as we do. It’s not a representative sample. 

I’ve had similar chats with Dave Sellick too, who’s quickly becoming an authority on AI in accounting after giving evidence at a House of Commons AI inquiry. Dave says that those of us actively engaged with AI are trying to run, when plenty of firms (and clients) are still learning to crawl.

Even the most advanced AI users in accounting are met with limitations. AI simply can’t do everything across the full end-to-end workflow of accounting. It’s very much a co-pilot; it’s not capable of flying the plane. (More about air travel later, funnily enough).

For AI to fully replace the accountant, we’d need to find a way to work with Gen AI’s probabilistic nature. That AI output is only probably right - and that it’s “confidently approximate”, to use Damon Anderson’s language - poses too much risk. It’s essential to keep a human-in-the-loop.

AI would also need to be capable of thought - performing at a level on par, if not better, than a person. And if it ever does evolve to ‘think’, I’m not sure it will ever be capable of the judgement that’s required in advisory. Let alone the relational aspects.

But let’s, for argument's sake, say that the AI of the future can be used to handle entire aspects of the accounting profession. Even then, we can be confident that our industry won’t disappear.

The 160-year-old concept that could predict where AI takes accounting

Back in the late 1800s, when the UK was undergoing a coal revolution, the English economist William Stanley Jevons took a contrary stance around what the new coal-efficient steam engine meant for the future of coal. 

Many were concerned that coal usage would drop - steam engines used less coal to do the same amount of work, and there was a prevailing belief that increased efficiency leads to lower overall consumption. Jevons saw it differently. And his theory, the Jevons paradox, turned out to be true: when a resource becomes more effective, demand for that resource goes up rather than down. 

Why is this relevant to accounting and AI?

The way I see it, just because a firm can be made more efficient using AI, that doesn’t mean that clients will need or want accountants any less. 

Firms may need to change their fee structures for certain activities if AI is deployed to help people work faster (the industry, and compliance in particular, is still somewhat stuck in a time = value mindset. Another reason to avoid timesheet-based pricing!) But perhaps more businesses will engage with accountants as the cost of entry falls? 

Lower costs = higher demand. That’s basic economics.

And I’m not the only one thinking like this. Stanford University economist Erik Brynjolfsson has talked about the Jevons paradox, AI, and what it could mean for certain occupations, using air travel and the efficiencies gained around cost per mile of air travel as an example:

"Pilots became dramatically more productive and effective once jets were invented. Did that mean that we didn't need as many pilots because now pilots could do more work? No. We consumers decided that we're going to fly more than ever. So now a lot more people fly. And there's more demand for pilots."

The less spent on compliance, the more to spend on advisory

Non-homothetic demand theory tells us that as budgets free up, spending goes elsewhere. Demand doesn’t diminish. It shifts.

So even if firms are forced to change the price of compliance, clients might just spend what money they save there on higher-value, more human-intensive services - like advisory. 

The strategic opportunity for firms then becomes less about racing to the bottom against other basic compliance firms and new AI-powered entrants, and more about creating sticky propositions higher up the value chain.

None of us should be thinking that our firms can stay the same. But that’s always been true; change is the only constant in life, and AI isn’t the only force that should inspire firms to innovate.

AI offers our industry more opportunities than threats if we’re willing to adapt.

They say that two heads are better than one. And there’s plenty of data to support that argument when it comes to founding a business.

For one, around 60% of billion-dollar startups have two or three co-founders. Even if your projected or goal revenue is just a fraction of that, there’s still plenty we can learn from companies that scale to unicorn status. 

Solo founders also take 3.6 times longer to outgrow the startup phase compared to a founding team of two. So if you want to get to a place of stability fast (or you’ve got an aggressive exit strategy), it can pay to be in a team.

I only say ‘can’ because not just any co-founder(s) will do. 

How do you choose the right partner for your firm?

Skills and traits: what’s needed in a firm’s founding team?

Let’s talk specifically about founding an accounting firm because, well, that’s what this newsletter is all about. But also because firms tend to be established between partners who share the same technical skillset: they’re all qualified accountants.

You don’t tend to see this in other sectors. Elsewhere, a C-Suite or founding team is usually formed by domain-level experts across Ops, Finance, Sales, People, and IT - and from a mix of professional backgrounds. 

I can only think of a handful of examples where, like accounting, the founding team would all have the same hard skills and have had the same or similar careers to date. In some ways that’s a strength. But it could also hold you back.

The type of co-founder your firm needs

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll have seen me write about what firm leaders have to gain from thinking less like an accounting firm and more like a business: I wish more firms took the time to consider their purpose and distinctive value proposition.

Because when a new firm comes to market with a defined purpose and unique reason for being, that firm’s owners should already have thought about the skills they’ll need in the founding team to deliver on their promise. With flinder, for instance, Luke and I were already data-articulate and hugely motivated by the difference we could make to clients by translating financial data into meaningful insights. If we hadn’t been, we wouldn’t have gone on to set up a new breed of firm that’s more insight-led than accounting-led. 

So, that’s one way to choose a co-founder: think about your firm’s purpose and value proposition, and the technical skills you’ll need at leadership level to make that possible. It might be something that naturally exists within the current partners’ skillset, or you might want to bring in an additional co-founder who owns that domain.

But it wasn’t only a shared vision that made me and Luke a good fit. There were plenty of other reasons why, when I first had the idea for flinder on holiday in the Caribbean, it was Luke I had in mind to do the journey with me.

The type of cofounder you need

Luke is an ‘Integrator’. He’s brilliant at designing systems and executing on the day-to-day. I can get into the details when needed, but it’s not what excites me. I fit a ‘Visionary’ profile: I naturally focus more on the big picture and future growth. 

(These aren’t terms I’ve made up, either; the ‘Integrator’ and the ‘Visionary’ are two contrasting but co-dependent leadership roles in the Entrepreneurial Operating System/EOS.)

Personally, I needed Luke and his way of seeing the world (and our business) to balance me out. Luke took on responsibilities around Operations, People, IT, and Performance, and I led on Strategy, Vision, Sales/Marketing, and Advisory. 

I recently asked Luke how he’d describe our match as co-founders:

“Alastair and I understood each other’s strengths and weaknesses from day one, and we built the business around that. He was CEO and the creative force; I was COO, making sure things got done”, he said.

If there are too many Visionaries in a founding team, details can get missed and things might not ‘get done’. Equally, new commercial opportunities could pass you by if you’ve got too many Integrators looking at just the here and now and looking past less obvious avenues.

So it’s not just technical skills that matter when building a founding team. 

In fact, I’d say that because a firm’s partners will likely share many of the same hard skills, it becomes all the more important to look for and work with the ways that you’re different. A blend of diverse but complementary skills, traits, or characteristics will help ensure you’ve got everything you need.

Diversity avoids groupthink

The risk of groupthink is greater in teams with ‘high cohesion’ e.g., when founders have the same professional background, like accountants.

Groupthink can be insidious because it easily goes unnoticed. If everyone’s happy following the status quo and doing things as they’ve always been done, there’s very little conflict at surface level. But a little conflict is necessary. It’s easy to mistake agreement for progress when you’re building a firm. If no one’s bringing a contrarian point of view or a fresh way of thinking, you’ll end up with big blind spots and poor risk management.

The opposite is true as well, though. You don’t want co-founders who disagree with each other at every step. It’s about finding an appropriate level of cohesion where you might come from diverse backgrounds or skillsets, but you’re aligned on what the firm wants to achieve and how you’ll do business together. 

Separate, natural skills and abilities can be used to pull in the same direction as long as you’re all starting from the same place. Bepi Jones, one of the co-founders of Abacai, sees choosing a co-founder as slightly more “luck of the draw” than I do - or at least how my experiences have been. For him, there might not be an exact right formula for who’ll make a great co-founder for your firm; people’s skills, passions, and personal goals can shift, but who you both are at your core is where you need to align.

Navigating your differences

Luke and I never really clashed, even when we had differences of opinion.

That’s because we had (have!) a deep trust and respect for each other’s skills, experience, and domains. And, to Bepi’s point, we have good values alignment.

If there was a decision to be made around sales strategy, for example, Luke tended to trust my instincts. The same went for operational decisions, where I looked to him for the final say.

In Luke’s words: “Clear, defined roles meant we could each make decisions in our own remit and trust the other completely. If something sat with me, he knew it would be handled, and I felt the same about him.”

Founding teams have to find a way to overcome their differences and work from a place of trust. It should also go without saying that you need to like each other too (and gel on a values level, like Bepi says). The average person spends 90,000 hours of their lives at work. For business founders? Maybe times that by 1.75 or more. You’ll spend a lot of time together, basically. Make sure you get along! 

That’s an essential foundation for trust to grow as well.

If one of you needs to be in control of everything all of the time, or struggles to see from anyone else’s perspective and isn’t prepared to change, then that person might be better off as a solo entrepreneur (and, honestly, good luck to them!).

It feels like software vendors want to pigeonhole firms into a nice, neat box. They’ve got their own idea of the technology and tools that accountants need, and there’s little flexibility or openness to hearing feedback (despite what they say). They fundamentally don’t understand 100% of what we do (despite what they think). So when a tool is genuinely useful for us, it’s usually siloed and focused on just one part of the business. 

That’s why we’re seeing more firms and firm owners branching off to build software solutions of their own. Stepping into the role of engineer, these experts are armed with lived experience and years of accounting know-how. They’re bridging the gap that today’s software offering can’t or just won’t fill. They’re building with empathy and nuance - something that third-party vendors have typically always lacked (despite what they profess).

In Justine Marshall’s case, she’s visualised what she wants using Claude Cowork and hired an offshore software engineer to make it happen: “I said to him, ‘Look, I’d really like to do this myself, but I don’t have the time’. I built out the front end of how I want it to look, and he’s bringing all the APIs together into one application.”

It just goes to show that if you’ve got a foundational understanding of what the technology can do, then that’s enough, with the right support, to bring a product to life. And with GenAI, “it’s an awful lot easier than you’d imagine.”

What Justine’s building and why

Justine’s whole ethos is to remove as much friction as possible from financial management.

Pinpoint Ops, named after her firm Pinpoint Plus, is a client-facing app to streamline bookkeeping and payroll processes - with user experience at its heart. Client modules are mobile-optimised and designed specifically for Justine’s typically deskless or on-the-go client base. The internal modules that only Justine’s team will use have been built for desktop first.

A key benefit of the app is that it increases visibility and signposting for clients: “So if they’re sitting there thinking ‘What do I do next?’ It’s there. It’ll show them what they haven’t done and prompt them to do it”, Justine explains. Pre-filled ‘Quick questions’ help speed up communication between the client and the firm.

The Pinpoint Ops prepayments (internal) workflow was one Justine and I discussed in detail.

Purpose

To automate prepayments/accruals, so the team doesn’t have to manage them manually in Google Sheets or calculators.

Input

User enters the item details, e.g. insurance, amount, start month, and duration.

What it does

Creates the Xero journal title with the month/year, splits the total across the required number of months, pushes the journals (for all periods) into Xero, and includes a checksum to prevent posting errors from bad calculations. It will also pull in the current Xero balance so the user can check it matches. It alerts the user if a prepayment runs out and hasn’t been replaced, or is near the end and needs a replacement/accrual update.

Overall, the workflow reduces the time spent manually creating/posting journals, and calculating them in working papers.

The tool stack required

Justine’s got to this stage - with the frontend user experience all mapped out, ready to code - in just three weeks, finding around two days a week from her spare time to put into the project. Admittedly, she’s had a bit of a head start: “I did a C++ programming course back when ‘online’ was new. So I understand how the computer understands it. I’ve got quite a good vision on how to build things,” Justine tells me.

But Claude Cowork has played a big role in expediting her progress: “I just type in there what I want it to do, and it does it very well.”

Then there’s Visual Code Studio (the code editor), Supabase for data storage, and GitHub for version control (if you’ve read other articles in this series, these tools should now sound familiar).

Instead of Vercel (a popular code deployment tool among people I’ve interviewed), Justine’s code is being deployed to Coolify, a similar alternative.

The watch-outs and risks

You’ll hear me talk about this a lot in this interview series, but AI isn’t perfect. It can make mistakes - and it won’t (necessarily) spot those mistakes itself. Building with AI requires an understanding of this risk and guardrails to protect against any errors slipping through the cracks.

For example, Justine’s prepayments module offers a faster and easier way to push journals. But without additional checks, it’s unlikely to run accurately 100% of the time. Pinpoint Ops automatically verifies that the correct number of rows is present (12), that the total amount matches the bill, and that there’s no fractional pence (or if there is, that it applies it to one of the journals).

What GenAI enables that otherwise couldn’t be done

GenAI can write code faster than human hands can type it. It can design a user interface faster than any person can move a mouse. But there’s another way that GenAI has helped Justine move at speed - it’s simply faster to spar, share, and test ideas with GenAI than a non-AI counterpart: “Going backwards and forward with someone, you can't get your vision out very quickly or easily. It would have been laborious.”

It’s GenAI’s near-instant results that help innovators realise and optimise their solutions. They can build as quickly as a new idea comes to them. As Justine describes it: “I just think it through, and then I see it happen. Then I think about the next step, and see that happen too.”

What does Justine’s AI use case mean for other firms?

But that’s not to say that Justine’s been going it alone.

She’s supported by her offshore developer, as I mentioned before. But she’s also leaned on her network - and Dave Sellick, in particular. What Dave’s doing with Sidgrove Intelligence originally inspired Justine to bring all her various tools into one app. Dave’s been helpful in defining Pinpoint Ops’ security setup too, specifically on logging in via Google or Microsoft accounts.

It’s worth stressing that while we talk about GenAI as a coding partner (or design partner, as Justine’s mostly using it) people still help people. There’s a great and growing community of accountants experimenting with AI. If you’ve got a question or a blocker, there’s every chance they’ve come up against the same challenge as well.

Ultimately, we’re all part of the conversation about how AI reshapes the industry. We’re just either on the side of the early movers, defining what new best practice will be, or we’re happy to have others dictate what that the future will look like.

If you’re like me, Justine, Rob, and Dave, who I’ve spoken to in this ‘GenAI in practice…’ series so far, you’ll want to be at the forefront. And you’ll want to be in the conversations we have at the AI Exchange, or our newly forming community of builders.

Drop me a message to get involved.

Thanks to Justine Marshall, Director of Pinpoint Plus, for her contribution to this newsletter.

PS. I love catching up with Justine - she always has an interesting perspective to share. You can reach out and connect with Justine on LinkedIn.

The client of the future could be very different to what we're used to today. I’m talking about one person at the helm, making £1 billion in revenue. 

It sounds impossible, but we could certainly get to a place where companies have more agents working for them than people. In this model, agents would perform the vast majority (if not all) of the legwork - even integrating and speaking to other agents in other organisations the way we email or Slack message today.

I’m not suggesting a future where companies and clients are 100% agent-led. I think we’ll always need leaders in the business to act as decision-makers or orchestrators of some description. Senior staff will also be needed to make judgement calls (an extension of the ‘human in the loop’ concept we apply to working with AI today). 

But a future where a firm’s client base is more agentic than human? I could absolutely see that happening. That’s why when I was asked to take part in an Accountex panel on exactly this topic, I jumped at the opportunity.

And if, or when, it does (in the next 5-10 years, according to Stuart Mcleod who was also on the panel), what will that mean for the value of a firm, its accountants, and the relationships it builds?

Context as a currency

There’s a limit to how much infrastructure can create a true competitive advantage. While there will absolutely be value in how a firm operates and the protocols it follows, there are only so many ways to link tools and agents together. And unless you’re building a totally customised AI-powered solution, it’ll be hard to create unique points of difference in how the firm of the future is set up.

Context is where it really gets interesting. 

By context, I mean the added meaning behind multiple datapoints - and not just financial data - you monitor and draw on to create value for a client. This could be context about the industry they’re in and how it’s evolving, or context about the client specifically but from many different viewpoints.

And within that context lie opportunities to be more valuable for clients. 

An invoice, for example, holds a set amount of data: Net, VAT, gross. But it also holds context. £1,200 net is a data point; £1,200/month to HubSpot, up 20% on last year, is context. The context tells you what the data means, which in this case could be that the client’s CRM costs are creeping up, eating away at profit, and can either be better managed or avoided with a new CRM tool.

That context - and your ability to surface it - could be worth a lot to organisations.

Accountants change role, but are no less important

There’s a lot of AI scaremongering happening in our profession. And narratives about AI ‘replacing’ accountants are something I want to dispel. Forget the idea of replacing, and think more about augmenting, improving, and even furthering what we can offer clients. 

Things will need to change, for sure. After all, what’s advisory to an AI agent? We can’t exactly sell in consultancy workshops to an agentic team. And how do we build and foster relationships when lunches and golf are out of the equation? I’m speaking in jest, a little bit, but the question is still valid.

I’ve often spoken about advisory and relationship-building as being a more future-proof proposition for firms as AI adoption grows. But if we’re not working with or for human beings, then what can we say is the accountant’s purpose?

On the Accountex panel, Emily Dear honed in on “the critical moments of the relationship” - the tasks that may only make up 5% of a firm’s activity, but will continue to be human-led because they’re something AI simply can’t perform.

Trust, judgement, experience; the role of the accountant may well shift from do-er to overseer. It’ll be you that a client’s shareholders and leaders come to for guidance. You’ll act as a much-needed backstop when workflows go wrong. Plus, someone’s got to build and optimise the firm’s infrastructure and context gathering so that you keep delivering value.

Even an agentic-led firm won’t be totally hands-off. Maybe we’ll be more architects than accountants in the future. Because even though the pattern-finding and data interpretation advisory work we do today is further up the value chain, it’s still something AI could do faster.

5-10 years will come around fast. What should we now?

Emily’s “critical moments” concept is a good place to start. She’s encouraging firms to look at their top 10 clients and identify the moments where you alone - as the human - fulfilled the requirement. Where you, not the process or the reporting, added value. Where you were absolutely necessary for success. Then keep building those capabilities. 

You might disagree that a 5 to 10-year runway is short. You’re right that a lot can change in that time. But we shouldn’t be fearful of the future or shy away from what it could mean for firms. Responding to change as it happens is leaving it too late. 

As Stuart Mcleod said on the panel, your firm’s next competitor could produce work at £1/hour and have almost unlimited potential to scale. What then? The best we can do is be at the forefront of change. We can’t wait for regulations, training programmes, and industry standards to keep up.

There are already examples of businesses achieving huge revenue per head by using AI. If it’s possible, we can’t expect our clients not to try - if we were advising them on commercialisation models, it’s something we’d have to recommend! And if there’s a future where our clients are agentic-led, then we’ll need to be agentic-led too.

Thank you to Emily Dear, Global Digitalisation Manager at Moore Global, Stuart Mcleod, CEO and co-founder of Archie, and Des O’Neill, Chief Delivery Officer at ProfitPro, for a fun and insightful conversation about ‘What happens to the value of relationships when your client is AI?’ at Accountex 2026.

Ask a firm owner why they set up their firm, and many will tell you it’s because they’re a qualified accountant - they have the skill, so what else would they do if they want to progress their career?

And while there’s undoubtedly some truth to that viewpoint, it’s also true that great businesses are motivated by purpose. I don’t necessarily mean an altruistic purpose, where you’re working for ‘the greater good’ of people and planet (although that’s great too!), but a purpose that explains why you started your firm and the difference you want to make in the market and with your clients.

Identify that purpose, communicate it, and you’ll find the right hires and land the right clients. Because as Simon Sinek is famous for saying: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.”

Purpose 101

I appreciate it can all sound a bit lofty and idealistic. But there’s data to prove the power of purpose, and it can be highly, highly strategic. 

Purpose isn’t an afterthought to consider once you’re already in business (although you can define it retrospectively, if needed). Purpose can directly influence your commercial performance, competitive advantage, and long-term value creation - it makes for a stronger, more successful firm.

Essentially, a purpose is your firm’s fundamental reason for existing beyond just making money. Purpose helps build trust in B2B. By communicating what you believe in, you attract other people who share in that belief, whether consciously or not. Stories about the ‘why’ behind a business (not just the ‘how’ and ‘what’) speak to the limbic system, the part of the brain that drives emotion, motivation, and behaviour. It’s this shared belief that helps form and nurture strong partnerships, and can help you stand out to the right people in a commoditised market (like accounting is becoming).

But purpose has to be embedded and understood across the business to deliver the full benefits. It can’t be something that sits with founders or partners alone. A Harvard Business School paper found that high purpose plus high management clarity equalled higher stock market performance. 

I spent a lot of time on vision-setting with all our new hires, including the offshore team. Everyone’s first morning included a session on flinder’s vision, mission, and raison d’être. I shared our views on insight, data, and storytelling - to inspire and motivate all roles around flinder’s DNA, and to set expectations. It took time and effort, but I believe it’s worth it: purpose-led companies report 40% higher employee retention and 30% higher innovation after all.

Purpose vs proposition: what’s the difference?

A purpose isn’t the same as a proposition. 

I mentioned above the why, how, and what of a business. Your proposition is what you do and how you do it. Your purpose answers why.

At flinder, our purpose was to help small businesses make better decisions. We did this by being insight-led, rather than accounting-led. Our offer, or proposition, was to go behind the numbers and give those numbers meaning, delivering actionable insights to help our clients grow.

Purpose and proposition are linked, but they are different elements to define.

How to define the firm’s purpose

Luke and I discussed why we were building flinder right from the very start. We were intentional about exploring and defining the firm’s DNA and actively wanted to build something different from what we could see in the market already.

That was a strong starting point for a differentiated purpose: we looked at the gaps and thought about how and why we’d be best placed to fill them.

We asked ourselves:

• What are we (as founders and partners) good at?

• What do we (as founders and partners) enjoy or feel passionate about?

• What does the market need, and is willing to pay for, that doesn’t exist already?

Your firm’s purpose could sit at the intersection of your answers to the above.

Luke and I were both passionate about insight and translating financial data into meaningful actions for a business. Plus, we were good at it - we had strong data understanding and commercial acumen from our time as consultants at PwC. We also had a strong instinct that an insight-led firm was needed; we'd spotted the gap while working at PwC and thought a new breed of firm would be a great addition to the market. It turns out, we kind of led a revolution and established a category.

There’s that old cliché that says if you enjoy what you do for work, you’ll never work a day in your life. That isn’t true when you start a business. But a genuine interest in and passion for your firm’s purpose will help fuel you through demanding times. 

I’m a big fan of the ‘Zone of genius’ theory too (something I only learned about on an entrepreneurs trip last year, but makes a lot of sense on reflection, and definitely helps explain why I personally felt so driven to set flinder up).

When we’re operating within our zone of genius, we’re capitalising on our unique set of innate skills and natural strengths to create value. 

What this value is is sort of up to you; it depends on what you’re uniquely good at and how that can be used to create commercial opportunities. For me, I’ve always loved working at a fast, dynamic pace: the unknown of building something, the rush of scaling. I’m more excited by founding a new business than running a successful one - it’s a big reason why I exited flinder to explore new avenues.

So what if your firm is already established and you’re yet to define your purpose?

I think the same basic questions apply: what is your leadership team good at, and what do they want to do more of? What problems are you solving for your current client base, and how does this align with the partners’ zone of genius?

It can be a little clumsy to define your purpose in retrospect. There’s a good chance that not all your clients will need or believe in your reason for being. And if it’s a radical shift in focus, you might find it fails to resonate with everyone in the team.

How much should the firm’s purpose be your purpose too?

I was recently being interviewed by Phil Hobden from Sage, and the conversation came around to purpose as a founder - specifically, how you “redefine your purpose” when you exit a business you started.

This is interesting because starting a business is hard, as I mentioned before! It can be a 7-day-a-week job in the early days; you have to be passionate about it, and you have to deeply believe in the ‘why’ if you’re putting in blood, sweat, and tears.

But what you build also has to live on without you once you exit. I said this earlier: the firm’s purpose can’t be yours and yours alone. And that brings crucial considerations for hiring and culture. 

If you were thinking about your exit strategy on day zero of starting a firm (which arguably we should be), then purpose, culture, and how both will be built and reinforced over time should be detailed in every business plan.

That way, when you exit, the purpose can be carried forward by the passionate and skilled people you’ve brought in, as well as the systems, methodologies, and language you’ve helped introduce. You can then go on to find new ways of exploring that purpose should you wish to (in adherence to your restrictive covenants, of course!)

Funnily enough, the new business I’m working on now, after flinder’s acquisition, is sort of an evolution of flinder’s business purpose. So, for me, the ‘why’ hasn’t really changed. I’m just finding new ways of achieving it.

If you study business or entrepreneurship, there’s a certain profile of person that’s presented as the ‘stereotypical entrepreneur’. 

Influential? Sure. Innovative? Absolutely. Disagreeable? That’s a characteristic that, ironically, leaves people divided. 

In his book, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell argues that disagreeableness is a key attribute and physiological capability among successful entrepreneurs. This isn’t to say that people who are cruel, obnoxious, or unpleasant always do well in business. But according to Gladwell, entrepreneurs do have to be “willing to take social risks - to do things that others might disapprove of.”

Saying ‘No’ is a great example.

A ‘No’ can feel uncooperative, to both give out and receive. It’s ‘just’ a quick conversation here, ‘just’ a short lunch to pick your brains there. What’s the harm? And what’s the potential win? As business owners, we want doors to open for us, and you never know where your next big opportunity will come from. A cold InMail on LinkedIn could turn into a valuable business connection. It could also be a massive waste of time. 

Learning to predict the difference comes with experience (and getting it wrong first). I said ‘Yes’ to almost everything in flinder’s early days. The balance came later.

When to say no

Before we get into the when, let’s take a second to focus on the why. Because that really helps reposition saying no as a productive call to make.

What happens if we say yes to everything? On a practical level, you’ll only take on more than you can manage. There are only so many hours in the day and saying yes quickly reaches a limit beyond which you have to start saying no anyway. 

But on a strategic level, you’re devaluing your time - to yourself and to other people. Pricing is a positioning tool: the higher the price, the more premium the product. If you give too much of your time away for free, you’re sending out signals that it isn’t worth much at all.

And that’s the problem: a lot of requests come through with no (direct) monetary return. Deciding whether an offer is worth your time means doing a quick calculation of your investment versus the potential outcome’s value. And that’s not a bulletproof method.

I know from experience what’s too time-consuming to be worth it for me now. For example, I’m very happy to speak on a panel, but I say no to most presentations. I find panels more engaging. I take and learn more from them personally. And, honestly, there’s far less prep involved.

I believe you can trust your instincts here, too. If a request feels off or too much, it usually is. 

Conferences should offer speakers more than a free ticket to take part, although I know many (or most) don’t. If being there will put you in the right rooms and in front of the exact right ICP to promote your firm, then the trade-off could well pay off. If not, then I’d really recommend you consider saying no. And if you’re going to take the offer, then get super clear yourself on why you’re saying yes.

Declining requests gets easier the busier you are. In fact, it becomes a key ingredient in maintaining a productive, effective use of your time and maximising marginal value. Even then, there’s a skill - maybe even an art - to saying no. 

There are ways to protect your boundaries and position your time as valuable without burning bridges or damaging your personal brand.

How to say no (5 examples I’ve used)

‘No’ can be a complete sentence, as the adage goes. But I’ve found that adding a bit more context and just being a bit more human is the best way to keep people on side.

The person you’re turning down might still be disappointed, and that’s okay. We need to practice playing with that ‘social risk’ if we want to master our time.

You can say ‘Not right now’. For example:

Hey, thanks for your email. I’m really swamped right now with commitments.

Feel free to get back in touch in 4 to 6 weeks and I’ll see what my availability looks like then.

Or… 

I would love to chat, but I’m heads down on a few projects at the moment. Can you please circle back in mid-April when I’ll have more breathing room?

You can also say ‘Not me’:

Hmm…I don’t think I’m the right person to speak to on this subject, but I might know someone who is.

Or…

Thanks for your email. Is there anything in particular you would like to discuss, as I might not be the best person to speak to? Can you tell me a bit more about how we can work together, so I can include the right person in the team?

You can also make it seem like it’s not just that person or that request you’re declining (even if it is):

We’re really swamped right now, so I’m blanket-not committing to any new calls, interview requests, etc. But thanks for your interest and I’d be happy to help over email if I can.

In each example, the boundaries are clear, but they’re also well-explained. They might not be the answer the other person hoped for, but they’re hard to disagree with. 

And if someone does disagree with your decision to decline, maybe that’s okay. If Gladwell’s theory of disagreeableness is right, then there’s value in being comfortable with not pleasing everyone.

All I know for sure is that saying no takes practice and experience. Over time, you’ll learn that the more time you have available, the more time you give away. The less time you have available, the less time wasting you can afford.

“When you think about a lot of accounting processes, they’re just a person moving data around.”  Rob Collings sees that as an opportunity. He’s building a browser-based solution that brings all that data into a central platform, allowing his firm to run more like an OS (operating system) - the AI-native finance team, as Rob’s calling it.

Rob’s proposition, Flexal, is a great example of how firms can use AI right now, today, to take repetitive preparation work away from accountants. And he’s doing it with the tools we know and recognise - Claude from Anthropic and Codex from OpenAI.

It’s also a pretty neat way of circumnavigating the risk of GenAI’s probabilistic nature. Rob’s using probabilistic tech to build largely deterministic workflows (a similar philosophy to Dave Sellick): “So much of accounting is rules-based work. AI isn’t good at rules-based work, but it can build the framework around it.”

What Rob’s building and why

Okay, so what does Rob mean by an AI-native finance team? 

Check out Flexal’s website, and you’ll see that he positions the firm as ‘human led, AI powered’. Basically, Flexal offers many of the same services we delivered at flinder (minus the strategic support) -  bookkeeping, month-end close, payment runs, payroll, management accounts, VAT, and annual tax - but building it out through their own central platform. It’s the work that clients need on a regular monthly or annual cadence. And it’s work that takes a lot of preparation time, so it’s ripe for automation.

For example, Flexal’s platform is minimising manual effort in payment approvals. It:

• Pulls all unpaid invoices from Xero

• Filters down on planned dates using a two-way sync with Xero, and surfaces these invoices to the Flexal team

• AI performs specific checks, such as reviewing the invoice and confirming the bank details

• Client approval of a payment run is handled through the platform, with an approval flow through Slack where most of Flexal’s clients work.

This means all of the workflow is handled in one platform, in the same way for every client, with AI providing support along the way.

Rob’s also automated a previously “pain in the arse” VAT returns workflow, extracting data from Xero:

• The VAT data is processed and synced back to transactions in Xero for easy review

• The app performs some deterministic checks (i.e checking if VAT rates are consistent between suppliers)

• AI performs a review of high risk transactions, along with some other steps

• Once the workflow is complete, the app can inform the client and seek approval.

The workflow is also synced with Claude, so Rob’s team can run an AI review of any invoice and have AI report on any inconsistencies or irregularities before sending to the client for approval.

With agents gathering and handling the firm’s flow of data, the Flexal team is freed up to have “useful conversations” with clients that “help push them forward.”

Rob sees this as a faster, easier, and more accurate way of processing data. Humans mostly catch data error issues “because they’re catching them by chance.” With AI, data quality is improved, and clients get the data they need with little to no delay.

So why build a bespoke platform for his firm when you can buy off-the-shelf tools for different workflows?

Existing accounting software isn’t interoperable enough for Rob. There’s also 20% of a modern firm’s needs that simply aren’t covered by vendors today, and rather than waiting for vendors to get around to shipping the features promised on their product roadmap, he’s taking control himself.

The tool stack required

As mentioned earlier, Rob bounces between Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex (another Generative AI coding partner). He’s using Vercel as a server and Supabase to store data and serve files.

The two coding partners are deployed for quality and security, too. Rob takes Claude-written code to Codex for a code review and security check, and vice versa.

The watch-outs and risks

At this point in Flexal’s development, Rob hasn’t quite tested the automations at scale, so edge cases still pop up from time to time and people still review the final outputs to make sure it makes sense. 

But he’s iterating as he goes. “Starting to use our own tool for real workflows was key - we don’t want to waste time building the perfect automation that we never use”

What GenAI enables that otherwise couldn’t be done

“The reason I built Flexal was because of the technology”, Rob says. “If we didn’t have GenAI, we’d have to raise investment to write a load of code and get to an MVP.” That’s a commitment or challenge Rob wouldn’t have been keen to take on.

Vibe coding using GenAI gets you to a minimum viable product (MVP) without paying for an engineer. It helps you test and validate a proposition with minimal investment. When you start to reach scale, Rob reckons he’d still “need someone who knows what they’re doing” - an engineer to hand over to.

What does Rob’s AI use case mean for other firms?

Rob was already using GenAI to manage “painful” reconciliations. And once you’ve seen the value and potential of automating a workflow, a natural curiosity emerges around what other gains you can make.

“If it doesn’t work the first time, just keep going with it”, Rob recommends. “You have to approach a challenge from different angles and use different agents. If it doesn’t work with one agent, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

And if you try and try and still can’t get it to work? “You learn in the process anyway.”

It’s good to be cautious - even “overly cautious by constantly asking Claude questions about security from different angles, and getting LLMs to review each other’s work”. “AI is used in very specific and controlled ways within workflows - we’d never dump a pile of client files directly into an LLM!”

Thanks to Rob Collings, Co-Founder of Flexal, for his contribution to this newsletter.

PS. I always love catching up with Rob as he brings perspectives from his time at both an accounting firm and a tech company. You can reach out and connect with Rob on LinkedIn.

“I’ve never thought the way we do accounting could scale with integrity.” That’s what drove Dave Sellick to set up Sidgrove, a portfolio Head of Finance firm for fast-growing tech startups. 

Today, Dave spends around half his time in Sidgrove on client work. The other half is spent developing his MVP (minimum viable product) app using Gen-AI - and the progress he’s made in the last 6 months “would have taken years” without AI.

There’s genuine commercial potential in what Dave’s building, but it’s more than just an economic venture. “I want to make sure I’m always staying ahead of the curve with any technology evolution,” Dave explains.

Like many firm owners I speak to, Dave views technology as central to the future of our industry. Importantly, though, he’s also advocating for better deployment of AI in firms. 

He’s anti “making it slightly less broken for cheaper and quicker” and pro using new technologies to create new value for clients: “I love innovating; I want to feel like I'm doing something that is absolutely cutting-edge in terms of what my clients are getting and what I'm delivering in terms of value.”

So let’s take a look at how he’s doing that.

What Dave’s building and why

Dave’s building Sidgrove Intelligence, a web app that pulls real-time financial data from multiple sources, centralises it, and translates it into something visual, digestible, and meaningful for clients. He calls it “a productisation of the tools and reporting that I’ve been creating for ten years.” It’s “almost like a practice manager that leads with advisory insights.” A scalable closed system that provides a better experience to clients, while improving ways of working for the firm as well.

I’m with Dave when he says, “As accountants, we don’t think enough about the client experience: how do they work, what data do they want to see?” 

This dovetails neatly with Sidgrove’s virtual Head of Finance proposition. But who Dave serves through Sidgrove and who he’s building for matters as well. He’s propelled by the demands of his tech client base - much like we were at flinder. Less demanding demographics are out there, Dave admits. But he likes rising to the challenge.

The tool stack required

‘Challenge’ is an interesting word because, to speak to Dave about how he’s gotten so far in six months, he makes it sound quite easy.

His tech stack is slim: a little Gemini and a bit of OpenAI for certain use cases, but he’s mostly always working in Claude. “The Claude ecosystem is my go-to”; keeping it all in one ecosystem means he can toggle smoothly between Chat and Code to make progress fast.

Dave tells Claude Chat what he wants to do in layman’s terms, and Claude Code writes it: a process known as ‘vibe coding’. Dave’s trained the agent to understand his shorthand instructions - he just sends the prompt ‘Let’s go’ and Claude follows a set of actions that pull the most recent data before it gets to work.

He’ll also ask it questions, like ‘How do I create a page where…?’, drawing on the LLM’s conversational interface and vast dataset to hone in on solutions. Dave stores his code in GitHub, deploys via Vercel, and uses Supabase as his app’s back-end. He learnt much of this through recommendations from Claude. 

But he’s not building blindly. He’s done his research and stresses that anyone experimenting with AI should know what the technology can do and what’s possible. The best way he’s found to do that, though, is just by learning as you go.

The watch-outs and risks

Dave understands the potential of GenAI, but also the potential risks. And herein lie the pros and cons of vibe coding among a non-technical audience. 

On one hand, being able to converse with an agent using your own vocabulary is no doubt an unlock for those who don’t know how to write code. But AI is fallible, too. It will make mistakes. And the less confident and competent you are with the technology, the higher the chance that you’ll overlook a problem by taking what a GPT has given you at face value.

This can be seriously detrimental for governance and security.  

“Being aware that security is a concern is a good first step,” in Dave’s eyes. But he also knows his limits. “I have an engineer friend who’s helping to do security audits,” and he’s also tapping into Anthropic Skills, sourcing engineer-created prompts to ensure his agent goes through rigorous levels of security checks.

Because when processing a client’s financial data, “none of that can be insecure”.

What GenAI enables that otherwise couldn’t be done

“[GenAI] has allowed me to MVP something that I wouldn’t have been able to do”, Dave tells me. And the opportunity isn’t just about him having fun experimenting with AI (although he is) and it’s not just about delivering new value for clients (which he also is) - it’s about “having a significant influence on the whole market, actually.”

On a practical level, AI does more than act in the role of Dave’s low-cost code writer: “It enables the person with the vision, and the practitioner, to be the engineer.” That delivers cost efficiency and speed: two critical factors when developing an MVP.

Dave knows his MVP has the sole purpose of testing the concept with clients and getting market validation: “I would never have taken it on not knowing whether there was value in it and investing all that money”. He’ll need to start building all over again to create a platform that’s ready to launch - and AI won’t be enough then. 

But in terms of how AI has helped him get to where he’s at and where he needs to go for this stage of the journey, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, have done it any other way.

What does Dave’s AI use case mean for other firms?

For me, the biggest takeaway from my chat with Dave is that the barrier to entry for product development using Gen-AI is lower than you might think. Sure, there are more entry-level AI platforms out there, like Cursor and Lovable. But Claude gives you a greater degree of control over your code, and you still don’t have to have the answers yourself. Just tell Claude what you want to do, and go from there. 

That said, a foundational understanding of how GenAI works is still essential. It can be a master key, but it’s not a silver bullet. 

GenAI is probabilistic, meaning it’s ‘probably’ correct at any given time: “Making mistakes is a feature of the technology. It’s not something that happens by accident.” If you’re relying on or trusting AI to be correct 100% of the time, you can quickly get into trouble.

This is less of an issue in this use case of getting AI to write code. After all, if you ask Claude to build you something and you don’t get what you want, that’ll be pretty obvious and you can always reprompt. But for other use cases of GenAI within firms, and for the industry as a whole that requires a quality threshold, Dave issues a warning. 

“GenAI will always tell you confidently that it’s correct” - that’s the primary difference between the fallibility of GenAI and the fallibility of your teams. A team member’s confidence in their ability will usually waver according to their skillset or experience. AI will always back itself and its response, even when it shouldn’t.

Right now, the best solution to catching AI’s mistakes is keeping a ‘human in the loop’. That’s how we’ll “elevate the ceiling”, rather than accepting AI as being “incompetent by design.” Otherwise, as Dave sees it, you’re “giving up on the potential for humans to work with technology to achieve higher.”

And if we look at what Dave’s achieved so far using Claude as a coding co-pilot, the potential for people to leverage AI in new, value-adding ways is pretty significant indeed.

Thanks to Dave Sellick, founder and Portfolio Head of Finance at Sidgrove, for his contribution to the newsletter.

PS. I always love catching up with Dave as he has such deep and thoughtful points on the profession. You can reach out and connect with Dave on LinkedIn.

Our profession isn’t known for being comfortable with risk. The stereotypical accountant is even less likely to seek out risky work for themselves. 

But if you’re going to uncover new opportunities and value within your firm, a little risk is exactly what you need - or a curiosity and openness to doing things differently, at the very least. 

This came up during an ACCA Accountex panel I was on recently. As practitioners and advocates of AI in accounting, my fellow panel guest, Melanie Foster from BHP, and I encouraged the audience to push themselves (and the technology) to discover what can really be achieved. A lot of accountants might be dabbling in AI today, but how many are taking measured risk to reap the full advantages?

I’m not talking about carelessly putting client data into the wrong hands, over-investing in a new platform that you haven’t validated properly, or any behaviour where the probable risk outweighs the potential reward. But trying, building, and being okay with getting it wrong is necessary if we want to make progress - it’s an attitude that’s important in all areas of an organisation, not just around tech. This is the same attitude we should be employing across the organisation regardless of technology.

Probabilistic vs deterministic: why AI feels so risky

Traditional accounting speaks in binary, deterministic terms: debtors and creditors, profit and loss, right and wrong. AI doesn’t. 

Generative AI (ChatGPT, Claude, and other similar tools that firms are using today) is probabilistic; it’s probably right at any given time, but it will still have total confidence that it’s always correct. I can understand why that would spook some people, especially in our industry.

The fact that it’s a nascent and evolving technology only exacerbates those concerns. Gemma Gathercole from ACCA, who hosted the Accountex panel, introduced me, Melanie, and the third guest, Paul Lodder from Dext, as “experts in AI” - to which I countered, we’re definitely not; very few people are. 

Why would anyone who’s been in accounting for years, even decades, want to feel like a total amateur at work again? That’s why many people talk about trainees being more receptive to AI and overall more challenging of ‘how things have always been done’. For the rest of us more tenured professionals, it takes a certain personality or mindset to dive right into the unknown. 

But dive we should, as long as there are guardrails in place. Data security and governance are key; Paul Lodder made the point of being cautious around free AI tools, as they’re not private by default. Free-tier conversations are often used to train AI models (and that includes any client data you process through the platform).

Not enough AI-native software vendors are publishing quality and security reports either. The more we know about the tools we’re using, their limitations and blindspots, the more we limit risk. It’s up to us to demand this information from vendors, as it’s not readily available right now. 

My very first Naked Accountant newsletter talked about ‘Accountancy’s AI data dilemma’. Nearly a full year later, despite the speed of change in AI, the questions around whether vendors can, should, or will use your client’s data to train their models haven’t been fully answered. It’s one of the reasons why many people I speak to are building their own AI-powered solutions (using GenAI as a coding partner) rather than buying from a vendor.

Ultimately, though, it all boils down to one question that only you can answer for yourself: how much risk are you willing to accept?

Your AI ‘risk tolerance’ is risk management in itself

Using GenAI requires accepting its probabilistic nature. But here’s the thing: humans are probabilistic too. You won’t be right every time in every task you do (sorry). And when we delegate, we’re willing to accept a certain threshold of accuracy and quality, whether consciously or not.

Do we expect teams to get everything right 100% of the time? No. If 97% of your transactions are correct, with a 3% margin for human error, would that be satisfactory? We work in teams and have junior staff managed by more experienced professionals to build in accountability and quality assurance. In AI, we call this keeping ‘a human in the loop’. And as long as you have someone checking or overseeing what your agent(s) produce, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be happy accepting the same accuracy levels we’d get from another member of the team.

It was Melanine Foster who told the panel audience that “tolerance levels” should form part of a firm’s AI strategy going forward. I agree; defining what risk you’re willing to accept should protect you from quality issues that occur outside of your awareness and outside of your control. 

But I also think that too many firms are expecting too perfect a result from AI (known as ‘automation bias’) - and, again, that’ll only stop us from making real progress.

Innovation is inherently risky. But if we don’t innovate, then we’re putting even more on the line. 

An upcoming newsletter will unpack a different Accountex panel conversation I was in, looking toward a future where our clients are AI (or, more accurately, where a client’s business is mostly agent-led). AI has already shaken up our industry and changed the way our clients operate. New commercial opportunities are there for the taking.

So what feels riskier to you: investing £200/month and some time in a top GenAI package and exploring the art of the possible, or sitting back and allowing competitors - and clients - to reshape the landscape without you in it?

Thanks to Melanie Foster, Chief Information Officer at BHP, Paul Lodder, VP Accounting Product Strategy at Dext, and Gemma Gathercole, Strategic Engagement Lead at ACCA, for a great conversation on ‘AI in practice’ at Accountex 2026.

Value leakage is one of the biggest surprises of selling a firm. No one prepares you for  ‘losing’ money that you’ve already mentally spent or allocated to another venture or personal investment. 

But that’s the thing: you haven’t lost that money really. It never actually existed. 

Experience teaches us to take business valuations with a pinch of salt. Too much can change between Heads of Terms and your exit to alter the payout (both in and against your favour). And then there’s the expense of selling a business, which can come as a shock to many.

Here are six hidden costs of selling a business and the potential impact they can have on the money you receive:

1. Working capital

2. Completion accounts

3. The buyer’s due diligence

4. A deal that takes too long to go through

5. Legal fees and personal tax

6. Leaving before the earn-out period

Let’s take a look at each one in turn.

1. Working capital

This is probably the least expected, or most surprising, cause of value leakage when selling a firm - not even accountants tend to see this one coming. And there are several risks to consider.

What’s the risk to your take-home?

Buyers don’t want to get lumped with a cash-strapped firm; that much is pretty obvious. If the closing working capital is lower than the target working capital, the consideration paid is usually reduced to compensate the buyer (meaning less money left for you).

But the real risk lies in failing to agree to clear working capital requirements early in the deal. Your definition of working capital or how it’ll be calculated could be different to what the buyers have in mind, leaving a big gap and a potential black hole for value to disappear into.

For example, some buyers might demand two months of working capital in the business upon closing (‘gas in the tank’ to ensure the firm can run smoothly and cover operating costs from day one). And if you envisioned something different, you might need to let go of that money to keep the deal alive.

How to avoid value leakage here

I can’t stress enough how important it is for all parties to be aligned on what’s expected from working capital for the deal to go through - so discuss this as early as possible. Ideally, you’d define the working capital requirements as early as Heads of Terms, rather than leaving it as ‘To be determined’.

Of course, there’s always some risk that actual working capital will vary between Heads of Terms and closing - a drop in accounts receivable, a hike in accrued expenses. But the devil is in the details, and a lack of clarity can be a really unexpected (but totally avoidable) cause of value leakage.

2. Completion accounts

Chances are, your management accounts won’t be totally up to date on the day you complete the transaction. You’ll need to do an extra set of accounts to bring your balance sheet up to date - showing the firm’s exact cash position (debtors, creditors, etc) to “true up” the numbers.

What’s the risk to your take-home?

Bad debts, slow-paying debts, loans - these all carry a penalty when it comes to the final enterprise value. Again it comes back to the working capital; any cash that was expected to be in the business at the time of completion (but isn’t) is going to be deducted. And you may not even know the impact of this until you sign on the dotted line.

How to avoid value leakage here

This can be managed way back when you’re establishing the business model. Subscription-based models offer greater predictability with payments made upfront. Time-based or project-fee models tend to result in lumpier cash collection and a higher risk of outstanding debtors on a completion date.

During the transaction process, though, you need to keep a close eye on your ledger and try to get ahead of any debtor you may not be able to collect cash from. If you’ve got a debtor book that’s six months’ old with loads of work-in-progress yet to be billed, that’s a red flag.

3. The buyer’s due diligence

“Buyers can be super neurotic about any liabilities that could arise,” - that’s the view of Michael Currie, the corporate M&A lawyer who handled flinder’s sale (though the acquisition team we worked with at Ascendant were always fair). 

Both buyers and sellers perform due diligence as part of the transaction. Sell-side, you’ll want to make sure you surface and resolve any potential issues ahead of time. On the buy-side, it’s all about avoiding a bad investment - that’s where the neuroticism that Michael references kicks in. 

What’s the risk to your take-home?

A buyer can’t afford to glance over risks and liabilities; everything that could cost them further down the line is calculated into how they value your firm. That covers anything from queries around equipment spend to customer churn.

How to avoid value leakage here

Some value leakage is unavoidable in due diligence. If a buyer decides to quibble over your equipment spend, you may have to take that one on the chin. Speak to your lawyer about the most common sticking points in due diligence so that you can prepare.

Client churn can be very detrimental to enterprise value. This is a risk you can manage way before deciding to sell by avoiding a business model that puts too many eggs in one client basket. I’ll champion a subscription model every day for many reasons; having a high number of clients who pay predictable fees each month is a real added bonus here. 

It’s also possible to mitigate client churn during the transaction by limiting how much the deal takes you away from your day job (a nice idea, if not always possible). Which leads me to the next point…

4. A deal that takes too long to go through

Letting the deal drag can cost you big. On occasion, it might even lead to the sale falling through (which costs you even more).

What’s the risk to your take-home?

It follows logic that the more time that passes between Heads of Terms and closing, the more time there’s been for the landscape to change.

You could lose clients, lose key team members, or lose your position in the market as competitors adapt. You might find yourself stuck in a period of stasis during the transaction. You can make minor to moderate changes to your model and work to retain or replace churned clients. But anything too disruptive could spook a buyer and disrupt the sale.

Even when external forces are calm and it’s ‘business as usual’ for you, value leakage can still follow. That’s because the process of selling will take you out of the business. With more focus on the transaction and less focus on the firm, performance can suffer.

It’s also worth mentioning that buyers will rarely acquire the firm in one upfront sum (and a lot of people don’t realise this). It’s not like you’ll one day wake up with £4 million in your bank account. The consideration payments could be spread over 1 to 3 years. That’s a 1 to 3-year window for your final take-home to change.

How to avoid value leakage here

If you read my newsletter on the easy mistakes that sellers can make and how to avoid them, you’ll have seen how crucial it is to be prepared. Failing to plan means you plan to fail, and preparation is everything if you want to move fast.

Don’t think you can prepare for the deal as the deal is happening. Get a lawyer early, build a relationship with them, and work with them to prepare as much paperwork as is feasible well in advance. Dry-run due diligence exercises to spot gaps or risks before a potential buyer does.

5. Legal fees and personal tax

A business sale is a business transaction, so all expenses go to the business, right? Nope.

What’s the risk to your take-home?

Some of your legal fees may be deducted from company expenses. But because the proceeds from the sale will (likely, if you don’t have some interesting HoldCo / VentureCo structure) go to you personally, then there’s personal tax to consider.

The same goes for legal fees. A lawyer who’s acting on behalf of the business can be charged to the business. A lawyer who’s acting for you is a personal expense. The latter will be where most of your legal fees get billed. And of course, make sure you include the VAT when you’re paying personally!

How to avoid value leakage here

I recommend fixing your legal fees, so you don’t end up with a nasty surprise (and hefty personal bill) once the transaction completes.

6. Leaving before the earn-out period

This last one on the list is probably the most significant ‘loss’ a seller can experience. 

What’s the risk to your take-home?

As humans, we’re blind to what we’ll want and how we’ll feel in the future - this is a very normal cognitive bias, known as an affective forecasting error. You may agree to a 3-year earn-out period now and then have a complete change of heart just a few months down the line. Maybe the culture isn’t right for you post-sale. Maybe your feet are itchier than you expected them to be, and you don’t want to be confined by the covenants you agreed to.

The basic maths is this: if you leave before your earn-out period is up, you’ll likely walk away with less. Some contracts will even fine you for breaking the earn-out period.

As I said above about consideration payments, you won’t automatically get paid out just because you exit the business. You’ll still need to wait until your earn-out period is over. 

In that time, you’ll have no control over how the enterprise value is protected (a nightmare for entrepreneurs and leaders who like to be in control). You’ll have no control over how churned clients are topped up (or any other causes of value leakage), and any drop in revenue is something that buyers will want clawback for.

How to avoid value leakage here

If you want to secure your deal value, it’s better to remain in (and engaged with) the business across the whole earn-out period. Although I get that that’s easier said than done.

Think seriously about why you might exit before your earn-out period is up. The restrictive covenants you signed will still be in place, and might even outlive your earn-out period anyway. Is what you can potentially gain worth the certain loss?

How to make more money when selling a business

If this all sounds a bit demotivating, I’d like to leave you with an idea from Adam Coffey: 

“A lot of times, business owners, or founders, build companies and then they think of monetising the asset as a one-time transaction… If you understand how private equity works, you know that any enterprise backed by private equity is going to be sold every three to five years. So as that company continues to grow, you can get multiple paydays.”

What Adam’s explaining in this interview is the concept of ‘rolling equity’.

If you have the opportunity to roll equity into the new venture as part of your acquisition agreement, then take it. Let’s say you roll 10% of your payout back in as equity. That 10% stake can really work for you in the future as the new venture grows in value. If you get in early enough, the venture you rolled into could 10x, and you could walk away with so much more money than the original enterprise value.

Like everything in business, you learn by doing. These are just some of the causes of value leakage that I’ve seen and experienced through talking to other sellers and have done my best to avoid while selling a business myself. 

Would any of these risks stop me from doing it all again? Hell no. I’m simply carrying this new wisdom forward into my next business. 

If you’re selling or thinking of selling, I’d take this free advice and use it to hopefully save you (or make you) a lot of money!

No two advisory projects really look the same. That’s part of the reason why consulting can feel out of reach for some accountants - that, plus the multitude of frameworks, acronyms, and diagrams that bigger firms tout to make the space appear intimidating.

In this newsletter, I’m going to break down a real, but anonymised, advisory project we worked on at flinder, consulting on a client’s finance function (or as a consultant would say “finance target operating model”). The output may have been a 120+ slide deck, but what we delivered can really be boiled down to three key principles.

This example is from the ‘discover’ phase of flinder’s five-stage advisory process. It benchmarks the client’s current context and what better looks like to solve their challenge or make them more effective, with a view to moving into the other stages of the transformation methodology.

Storytelling is a crucial skill in advisory, particularly so in early discovery phases. 

A discovery deck should tell the story of what’s happening in a client’s business today, paint a vision of where they could go, how you’ll partner together to make that future happen, and what the impact of that will be.

It’s the classic beginning, middle, and end of any story arc. 

As I mentioned before, decks like this can often end up going to 100 slides or longer, it all depends on the complexity of the client and the breadth of the work. So how do you make sure those decks are all killer, no filler? 

What has to be included? And how do you present that information in the most meaningful, engaging way, so that your message lands and you present with authority? 

Sticking to a single, clear narrative is key - you can normally feel it yourself if a presentation starts to meander, as you’ll loop back to old points or go off piste to cram something else in. The appendix exists for a reason. Learn how to use it!

3 parts to a clear consulting output

We talk a lot about ‘as-is’ and ‘to-be’ in consulting. Bear that in mind and you’re over halfway there to having your story framework.

1. Benchmarking: where are we today?

It’s usually a new CFO or another incoming C-Suite member who’ll be driving the need for advisory. Maybe they want clarity on how effective the function is, so they have a good baseline to work with. Or perhaps they have a feeling that something’s not quite as it should be, but they don’t understand the full scope of the challenge.

Your role is to tease out the truth of their current situation - the context they’re operating in. You do this by gathering and analysing both quantitative and qualitative data. Both are necessary inputs to get a full view of the context.

On the qual side, stakeholder feedback paints an emotional picture. It surfaces real-world limitations and concerns from people in roles across the organisation. What do they think about the business’s finance function as customers/stakeholders of finance? What’s working and what isn’t for them? Issues like tasks taking too much time and departments not delivering on KPIs are common (and don’t expect people to mince their words). Stakeholders outside of the finance function may also raise gaps that haven’t yet been identified. 

You will learn so much from stakeholder interviews. This is a fundamental step to understanding the landscape of the problem you’re solving and the story you’re going to tell.

Not all accountants are that comfortable with data of this kind. But advisory is a new skillset to develop, so be prepared to step out of your comfort zone.

Especially because the other side of the coin is something that should feel like home: quantitative baseline data. 

• What’s the finance function’s current cost profile (salaries, technology costs, audit costs, etc)?

• How efficient is the finance function today? How many FTEs are on key tasks?

• What’s the process cost as a % of revenue (by business unit)?

• What are the costs by value driver (which value drivers are most efficient and inefficient, and why?)

• …and what does this data tell you?  

Presenting the numbers isn’t enough. You’ll need to analyse, question, extrapolate, and rise above the raw data to highlight opportunities for improvement. This helps build the business case for future stages of advisory.

2. Opportunities: what could happen in the future?

At this stage of the output, your firm can add a lot of value by going beyond just listing areas of improvement - prioritising them against criteria that make sense for the client.

You can also assess whether the opportunities are system or non-system related, and whether dependencies are likely. Basically, you want to show that you’ve considered the client’s real-world context; your recommendations aren’t pie-in-the-sky thinking. They’re valuable, reasonable, and achievable together.

I’d always lead with a prioritised table summarising the opportunity, interdependencies (if applicable), value to the business, and ease of implementation. This acts as your TLDR - deploy some System 1 design cues to the chart’s design, to quickly communicate how many are high, medium, and low priority.

This is all thinking that you’ll have done as a team, way before the presentation gets produced. The expected value of a change versus its ease (or not) of implementation is an exercise for internal workshopping. You can share your workings in the presentation (like the example below), with details of the workshops (process, output, etc) held back for the appendix.

You can definitely go into detail on each opportunity in your presentation deck, starting with the highest priority opportunity and working from there. Just try to be as concise as possible here and use a shared visual framework for each opportunity you list.

I like the example below as it explains the current challenge, paints a future vision (i.e. how we’ll solve the problem), and is clear on the benefits to the client. I like to include a small “value x ease” chart in the corner of the slide too, for additional framing.

Obviously, the more opportunities your baseline has identified, the longer this section will be. 

Read the room: there are far more dynamic ways to present than reading each word from the chart verbatim. You can always focus on the high-priority improvements first, then leave the rest for people to pick up later.

3. What better looks like: what, in real terms, will have to change?

This is where your recommendations take a more practical shape. 

What new operating/delivery model(s) are you recommending? What would a transition from the current to a future model look like, and what impact would that bring?

Helping clients to design what better looks like for them is the crux of an advisory service. Left with a lot of information about what could be done, many businesses will end the project there. They’re likely too time-poor to work it out for themselves. The slides in this section of your deck could end up looking pretty complex (like the below), but it’s all about removing friction from the process - and positioning your firm as the best partner in guiding the transformation.

I like to include design principles that help illustrate what practical aspects will change. These are developed in a workshop with the right stakeholders, taking into account some of the qualitative feedback. For example, technologically: ‘best of breed’ applications will be used across the finance function, and there’ll be a move towards automation to reduce manual intervention, etc. How exactly you’ll get that done will be determined in the next advisory phase (‘discover’ to ‘design’). 

At this point in the journey, you want the client to buy into what you’re suggesting, to build confidence in your firm as a partner, and to give clarity on how long it could take to roll out these changes as part of your next steps.

What to push to the appendix

The quick answer is everything other than what we’ve covered above. 

There will certainly be details you want to share that sit outside of the main story. Even something as basic as a list of the stakeholders interviewed is good for the client to know, but you don’t want to waste time or risk deviation by presenting this information. (Plus, their input should be anonymised anyway!)

Like I said up top, try presenting the deck back by speaking it out loud. Anything that feels jarring or interrupts your flow can get moved to the appendix. 

Great advisory output isn’t measured by how much you include. It’s quality over quantity, even when that deck exceeds 120 slides!

It’s easier than you’d think to write lots of nothing; quality at the input stage - knowing what to ask, who to ask, and why that all matters - leads to a quality output. And shit in = shit out. 

That’s why advisory is a skill that develops with practice. For one, it takes experience to know what context (the client’s ‘as-is’) is worth your time to explore. Trust me, you could spend months getting lost in the qual and quant data. But translating that context into a future ‘to-be’ vision - clearly describing the opportunities that create value for their business - is what advisory clients are paying for. Of course, prioritise telling a clear story and positioning the client as the hero (rather than your firm), you’re there to guide them to succeed.

Firms can’t be blamed for wanting a slice of the advisory pie. Advisory and consulting can bring in good money, adding a new and diversified revenue stream to (potentially) boost growth.

But winning an advisory project is one thing. Next, you have to deliver it.

And you need to deliver it well. Consulting fees are calculated to reflect the trust that advisory clients put in the firm and its people. By agreeing to a consulting project, clients buy into the impact and value-add of working together. They’ve got a problem that’s costing them, and they believe that you can help solve it. 

Most firms aren’t ready for what that actually requires. It’s not just about knowing what ‘better’ could look like and redesigning new systems (which is a role more accountants might embrace as AI evolves). Acting as a “Virtual FD” and reading P&L variances is not advisory in my eyes, either.

Advisory requires a certain set of skills and behaviours that sit outside of the classic accountancy mould. Most firms can’t just decide to ‘do’ advisory - not if the right culture and strategic hiring plan aren’t in place first.

The skills needed to deliver advisory (and where they differ from “traditional” accounting)

It’s not like bookkeeping/compliance and advisory/consulting are exactly night and day. Advisory hard skills are extensions of the hard skills many accountants are trained on. 

Data analysis and interpretation, financial modelling and benchmarking - an advisory service relies on firms being able to read patterns and extrapolate trends. So far, not so different to aspects of accounting. 

But as I said at the outset, an advisory client cares about more than your numerical literacy. They’re commissioning you to make that make sense for them. And it’s here that the soft skills required for advisory really start to diverge from what the institutions teach.

(Side note: I don’t like the idea of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skills. ‘Soft’ skills might be less tangible, but they’re far from easy to get right, and research has shown that soft skills deliver real value.)

Advisory is only successful if you get below the skin of the client’s organisation. It demands having a crystal-clear understanding of their challenge (arguably, a better understanding of it than they were able to brief you on). 

This is only achieved by interviewing stakeholders and analysing qualitative and quantitative data together. The numbers could tell one story, but employees say something different. Advisory is about identifying that and getting to the heart of why. 

Question-crafting is essential. It’ll help you uncover the real issues at play. But you’ll also need stakeholders to feel comfortable talking to you. Rapport-building, empathy, active listening: you won’t get very far with your data collection if people can’t open up.

Then come the skills of addressing and organising a group. Workshop facilitation is a key part of advisory. You’ll need to know workshop theory and design (forming, storming, norming, etc.). You’ll go in with a plan to achieve what you need, but you’ll also have to be adaptable and dynamic, as not all sessions run as they should. Leading half-day workshops, thinking on your feet and not knowing the answers, is something that few accountants are initially comfortable with. It goes against the black and white logic that accountancy is built on.

The more influence you have on the group, the smoother the sessions will run. The same can be said for reporting and presenting back to clients - you’ll often be faced with sharing hard truths and unexpected outcomes. Confidence, persuasion, and surety get people on your side and to buy into your findings, even if at first they disagree.

There’s a good way and a less good way of presenting information. At its most basic, all presentations are stories; you’ll need to keep clients engaged and following along, or else you’ll lose their trust and interest. I’m reminded of what Alex Bond Burnett told me when we spoke back in 2025: “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.”

Advisory can bring up many discussion points; the landscape is complex to navigate. It’s your job to present a clear narrative with clear next steps. This is as much about what you’re saying as how you’re saying it, too. Your tone, speed, and body language all contribute to the message. When you change the ‘feeling’ you want listeners to walk away with, you’ll automatically change the way you speak (I learned that first-hand at a theatre skills evening I went to - the things we do for self-development! 🤣)

The two modes of cognitive processing (System 1 and System 2) are a helpful framework to follow as well. System 1 thinking is fast, intuitive, and speaks to people’s emotions. Think, using a visual traffic light system to flag issues - that’s something that an audience instantly ‘gets’. System 2, on the other hand, is more logical and analytical. This is where accountants will feel most at home, using tables and graphs.

Presentations can be detailed without being ‘death by data’. I’ll go through what this looks like in practice for advisory in a newsletter soon.

The raw soft skills still need shaping

Advisory isn’t plug and play; it’s not as simple as hiring for the right skills and deploying a service line tomorrow. 

The skills above are all honed with experience. You’ll get better at advisory and consulting with every project you do; you’ll have institutional knowledge plus the findings of trial and error. And you will be able to think on your feet much easier.

And here’s where the culture piece comes in. I said that firms can’t just ‘do’ advisory. Best-practice accumulation is one aspect, culture is another. Advisory is simply too big a task and too demanding a proposition to take on if it doesn’t align with your values. Firms that are hungry for a challenge, are curious about improvement, and disrupt the status quo - these are the firms that fit advisory best. 

Other firms can try to support a consulting offer. But if your firm’s mission is more about bookkeeping mastery or using tech to be as hands-off with clients as possible, then you might quickly start questioning if advisory is worth the effort.

Where should you put your money moving forward?

I’ve always been a fan of advisory (that’s only natural, given my background). Advisory can be an interesting, challenging, and highly valuable proposition if it’s done well - and if it’s baked into a sustainable business model for the firm.

But I think there’s something more important at play here than what we’ve heard before. 

What I think we’ll see in the future is that as compliance gets cheaper, budgets free up. That won’t mean a reduction in accounting services or clients using accounting services. But it will mean a shift. 

Because, at a market level, businesses won’t just pocket these savings (that’s not what good businesses do). They’ll spend that money on higher-value support from accountants, and that’s where advisory fits in. 

Advisory is exactly the type of higher-value, relational service that - if we look to non-homothetic demand theory - clients will want more of. Not because they're becoming more sophisticated, but because AI will likely make compliance cheaper, and freed-up budget doesn't disappear. It moves. 

History tells us that when the cost of a commodity falls, spending shifts toward higher-value, more human-intensive alternatives. My current thinking is that compliance at scale will be increasingly automated, and advisory services will grow to become the dominant share of human time and client budget in accounting. 

And if that’s true, then firms that aren’t yet exploring advisory have some catching up to do.