In this solo episode, I’m helping you decide whether offering advisory services is something you should pursue in your business. I’m also giving you a little taste of the first lesson inside of our newest program: Elevate, where I teach the foundational skills of offering advisory!
In this episode you’ll hear:
Thanks for listening. If this episode inspired you in some way, take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram Stories and tag me, @ambitiousbookkeeper
For more information about the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast or interest in our programs or mentoring visit our resources below:
Visit our website: ambitiousbookkeeper.com
Follow the Blog: ambitiousbookkeeper.com/blog
Connect on Instagram: instagram.com/ambitiousbookkeeper
Connect on LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/in/SerenaShoup
Connect of Facebook: Facebook.com/serenashoupcpa
Thank you for your support of our show. If you haven’t left a review yet it’s super simple. Please go to: https://www.ambitiousbookkeeper.com/podcast and leave your review.
Podcast Publishing Tools
In this solo episode, I’m helping you decide whether offering advisory services is something you should pursue in your business. I’m also giving you a little taste of the first lesson inside of our newest program: Elevate, where I teach the foundational skills of offering advisory!
In this episode you’ll hear:
Thanks for listening. If this episode inspired you in some way, take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram Stories and tag me, @ambitiousbookkeeper
For more information about the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast or interest in our programs or mentoring visit our resources below:
Visit our website: ambitiousbookkeeper.com
Follow the Blog: ambitiousbookkeeper.com/blog
Connect on Instagram: instagram.com/ambitiousbookkeeper
Connect on LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/in/SerenaShoup
Connect of Facebook: Facebook.com/serenashoupcpa
Thank you for your support of our show. If you haven’t left a review yet it’s super simple. Please go to: https://www.ambitiousbookkeeper.com/podcast and leave your review.
Podcast Publishing Tools
[00:00:00] Are you ready to offer advisory services to clients? In today's podcast episode, I'm going to help you decide so let's just get straight to it.
[00:00:12]
[00:00:41] Advisory is a hot topic in our industry. And honestly it has been for the past-- well, since I started my business nearly six or seven years ago. And it's almost like the conversations literally have not changed. The. The saying goes like bookkeeping is a commodity. You have to add value to your clients. You need to get into advisory advisory advisory.
[00:01:07] But like, how do you know if you're actually ready to start tapping into advisory, if it's even the right fit for you and your business, or if you even have the skills? So I wanted to talk about that in today's episode to help you figure out if you know you're ready and where to go to start building the skills. So I would say, ask yourself a few questions to figure out if you're ready to start offering advisory.
[00:01:41] Number one: are your clients asking for more detailed information about what their numbers mean? Are your clients asking you for more? Like, are they asking you to go deeper with them?
[00:01:55] Number two: are your clients growing and you see a need for better guidance and decision making
[00:02:02] around their growth to help them maximize the money that they're bringing in, helping them make better decisions? Like, are you seeing areas where they can improve in their numbers?
[00:02:14] Number three: are you bored with the transactional work and want to make a bigger impact for your clients? That's a big one. That's a big question to ask yourself, because if you're satisfied with where things are at in your business and it's working, and you're making the money that you wanna make, and you're happy, then maybe it's not the right move for you to chase this advisory services path. Which I may be shooting myself in the foot here since I held people with this, but honestly, like it's not the right fit for everybody. And there are absolutely days where I'm like, do I even wanna do all of this for clients? <laugh>. Like I kind of wish I could just log into QuickBooks or Xero, process everything and log out and be done. <laugh> so there's that.
[00:03:01] And then number four: do you feel like you're capped at what you're charging and you don't want to increase prices without offering more value? Now, this is a really important one, because you might answer yes to the first part of that question, "Do you feel that you're capped at what you're charging?" that could be a yes for lots of people, but the other part of the question is, "And you don't want to increase prices without offering more value." There is a lot of advice out there talking about, just raise your prices and increase your prices and LA LA LA but you really should not. Increase your prices unless you are offering more value. Now I will caveat this, that I have definitely worked with some bookkeepers who are way undercharging for even what they're doing, and should just raise their prices, but it still requires a value conversation with the client explaining and showing them the value that, that you are already providing. So in that case, you're already providing more value and you need to raise your prices, that's a kind of different conversation, but if you are literally not going to change anything about the way that you're delivering services and you truly are capped at what you're charging, I don't think it's the right move to just raise your prices 100-200% without at least presenting a slight additional value to the client. So I think that is an important conversation to have. And I think I actually talked about this in the masterclass that I did a while back with Alyssa and it is a bonus episode. So if you scroll back in your podcast player, For episodes that say bonus in brackets, you should find the, How to Package and Sell Advisory Services Masterclass and we dive into that whole conversation there.
[00:04:56] So if you answered yes to any or all of the questions that I just talked about, then you may be ready to start offering advisory, and honestly there's lots of different ways to offer advisory. There's lots of different things you could be doing, but. I think step one in becoming an advisor is just being able to talk about the numbers, and what they mean to your clients? It's just strictly analyzing and presenting the information in a way that they can understand it.
[00:05:27] And that is why I created my newer signature program called Elevate. I was at a Workflow Queen retreat teaching on a couple of topics that maybe are a little more advanced, but when we had kind of broken apart into groups, and some people had gone into a different room to work through certain things and I was in one room with a few people. I kind of just got on this tangent and in this path where people were asking me, like how do you present your financials to clients and what do you do? And so I started showing them the way that we summarize financial statements for clients and talk about them in something called a five minute financial overview video. This is something that we actually do in our meetings, but we also provide. As a video if clients aren't meeting with us, so they're still getting the information that they would've gotten from a meeting. There's just not the back and forth questions that can happen.
[00:06:28] So I would say this is a really good place to start. And in providing just a short little overview video for your clients, so I was showing this to the ladies in the room. And towards the end of the retreat, based on things that I was teaching in this room, a few people were like, why are you just teaching, like people getting started with their bookkeeping businesses? And I was like, well, I'm not, I'm actually teaching this in my program. <laugh> But it turns out like a lot of people that have gone through my program, weren't ready for this information. So they hadn't even realized that they had access to it.
[00:07:08] And so we made the decision to strip it out of the bookkeeping business accelerator and create a new container so that we could help serve more bookkeepers that were actually ready for this, that had opted out of the Bookkeeping Business Accelerator, because they had already started their business, they were already pretty seasoned, they were doing the things, they were getting clients, they were pricing decently. And so we were pretty much excluding people from this little section of the program because they didn't think they needed the rest of it. And then the people that were in BBA, didn't even realize this information was available to them because they weren't ready for it. So we decided as a company to break the two apart and create two separate programs.
[00:07:57] So now we have a program called Elevate. We call it a sprint. So we go through it in just one month, because that was another thing is like some of these programs get so dragged out, that people drop off, they don't stay engaged, they don't actually get the value that they need out of it because they get busy with life. And so we created a smaller, shorter container. Like smaller as in less people as well, so it's capped at 20. At the time of this recording, we've been capping it at 20 people per cohort. It goes for one month for four weeks and each week we meet for two hours in a zoom meeting. So I teach live so you can stop and ask questions, and then we dive in, hands on. And so you can bring and work. On a client alongside of me as we're going through the content and ask. Specific questions about that client.
[00:08:51] The reason we designed it this way is because yes, there are other programs out there teaching this, but not offering the hands on guidance that you really need in order to really be mentored in these skills and build these skills. So I had the advantage of learning this type of stuff throughout my career in corporate and having a supervisor and a mentor explaining to me like this is why the board needs to see it this way, this is what they're gonna be looking for, this is what I wanna see as the CFO, and things like that. So, I've compiled all of that knowledge that I have from working in corporate, and knowing how businesses run, into a program to be able to, as best I can, share that information with you. If you don't have that mentor or that that guide and didn't learn it hands on in corporate. So this is the best I can do without you actually working for me <laugh> and putting it into a program.
[00:09:49] And so the live component is really the most important part. And we do the live class and we go through things live together on zoom. We can screen share, and you can ask questions. And then what's also included is a group Voxer. So Voxer is like a walkie talkie app. I made the decision to not run this program with a Facebook group, cuz we all have enough Facebook groups in our lives. And I wanted it to feel like your intentionally opening that Voxer app to get the support that you need. And be immersed in other people asking the questions as well, because it's really helpful to hear other people's questions or issues with clients that you may not have come across yet. But now that you've heard someone else ask the question or have this issue with a client, you're better equipped for when that happens with you and one of your clients. So we have this group Voxer you can text and you can do voice chats in it, and get your questions and support in between the weekly calls.
[00:10:54] The recordings are housed in a system that I use to host all of my courses called Kajabi. And so you get access to the recordings of the two hour trainings for life after the program is over. So you have them to refer back to. The way that we designed this program was very intentional. Like I said, it's over four weeks, so you can get what you need out of it pretty quickly instead of letting it drag out and just kind of fizzle out. The core topics that we go over in the program are in the first week we cover analyzing financial statements. And at the end of this podcast, I'm actually gonna play the first few minutes of that lesson, where I talk about why it's important to be able to analyze financial statements and how it is the backbone and the base for being able to provide advisory services. So that is like number one, the most important skill to be able to build, if you are going to start advising businesses.
[00:11:55] And then in week two, we cover client meetings, how to hold client meetings, and I give you my exact process for the five minute financial overviews. Which, like I said are sometimes in loom and sometimes they're in the actual meetings and I give you templates for summarized financial statements in an email. So we'll bullet point out for some clients. The key points that basically we're covering on the five minute financial overviews as well. So we cover that in week two and I give you templates and scripts to all of this.
[00:12:27] And then in week three we covered cash flow forecasting. Give you a template for that as well.
[00:12:33] And in week four, we cover budgeting. Forecasting and advising for growth. And so that one is like the meatiest lesson in the program for sure, because I go very in depth to how to build out a budget, the different scenarios that you're gonna need, and how bigger companies use the budgeting process so that you can take that back to your small business and give them the success that bigger companies see. And then we talk about how to advise around those budgeting processes and how to help them increase their profits and increase revenue, and grow their business.
[00:13:10] So that is pretty much a breakdown of the program, Elevate, that we've been running in a live format over the course of. Four weeks. So we did one in the summertime and that's the recording that you're going to hear here in a few minutes. That was the summer sprint and we are running a fall sprint in the month of October. So. If you're interested in joining us. And starting to build these skills, you're not gonna learn this overnight. Even throughout the program, you are going to have to practice lots of things and practice on clients and tweak and grow. It's an ever evolving process, but this will give you the foundations that you need to start offering advisory. So, if you're interested in joining that, go to ambitious bookkeeper.com/elevate and all the information will be there. So that you can make an informed decision.
[00:13:59] Now another question that comes up a lot, and I mentioned this at the top of the episode, is, "Are you going to be teaching how to package and sell these advisory services in that program?" and yes, <laugh> but also, I run a masterclass on this. So if you want to watch it live, I will be running that again soon. I don't have a date nailed down at the time of this recording, but I will have a link in the show notes so that you can register for that free masterclass, which is really helpful to help you decide further if this is something that you want to pursue in your business. So I share with you how to package these services and how to sell them. And in the program Elevate, I actually dive even deeper into packaging and creating a structure for offering these services. I know how much you all love structure and love the black and white, step by step, so we talk about this inside of Elevate and I help you formulate the structure that will work for you and how you want to provide these services to clients. Cuz it's not a one size fits all, unfortunately.
[00:15:07] So yes, there is a free master class on how to package and sell these advisory services. You can also scroll back in the podcast and listen to it. You won't have the benefit of the visuals of the slides, but it's a great conversation to listen in on. And I will just say again, what doesn't work in, increasing your prices is just slamming a hundred percent increase clients and expecting you to just have the confidence to be able to sell that service or upsell to the client. And that's why I built the program, to teach you the skills and that's why I'm also not charging extra for the master class, because I want you to know how to sell the services first. And then if you already have the skills to be able to offer them, then you're good to go. But if you need to build the skills to have the confidence to increase your prices and offer those services, that's why I have Elevate for you. And I would love to be your mentor inside of Elevate and help you start building the skills to be an advisor to your clients.
[00:16:10] And the other aspect of that is. You might have to change your branding and how you present yourself to clients and how you currently serve clients. So just keep in mind, it's not something that can just happen overnight. You can do various things like building your skills with Elevate in the program, and adjusting your branding. And tweaking your messaging, but it's not something that's going to happen overnight. So I am going to get off my soapbox now, and play the first few minutes of the first lesson inside Elevate, so you can really get a taste of what it's like to be inside of one of my programs, if you're not already. And you can also get a taste to see if. Elevate is right for you.
[00:16:56]
[00:17:01] I'm just gonna kind of go over how it's gonna go. I mean, I sent a voice note, hopefully everyone is in Voxer, also sending the same stuff in email. So hopefully everybody has the information that you guys need today. We're going to be going over analyzing financials. I would go around the room and, and have everyone introduce yourselves, but instead I think I'm gonna have you either, just, if you haven't already done it in the Voxer chat, go ahead and do it there. If you guys have questions, as I'm talking through the lessons, feel free to put a queue in the chat box and ask your question as you think of it that way we have all the questions and then when I pause to answer questions, they're all there. And you don't have to remember like what, what you were trying to think of.
[00:17:48] So I'm gonna do a short lesson and then I'm going to switch over to demoing raise of hands here or type in the chat. Me, if you, or what software you use, rather? Xero, quickBooks. All of the above. cool. Cool. All right. QBO. All right. So then the majority of everyone is in QBO, so I will be demoing things in QBO. If we have extra time, I'm happy to also demo things in Xero. That is my preferred software.
[00:18:20] The handouts that I give you are everything that can be done in one software can be done in another. There just might be small tweaks. So hopefully everyone is good with that. Yay. All right. Cool. Becky said that I love both as I want to learn Xero and you must know something. We all don't well I prefer Xero for lots of different reasons, but it, it works really well with the industry that I work with. Mainly because my industry has large fluctuations in volume and so with course creators, they have launches. So there's some months where there will have like 500 through a thousand transactions if they had a big launch and Xero enables us to kind of like mass code, all of that at once.
[00:19:03] I know you can do some mass coding in QuickBooks. Xero knows how to play a lot nicer in the sandbox. Yeah. Yeah, so that's one of the reasons the other big reason is that it integrates directly with Stripe and PayPal. So we don't have to use a third party app to bring the Stripe transactions in and that's the main payment processor for our industry.
[00:19:21] So I do have a podcast on all the reasons why we love Xero. So definitely search that up if you're interested in hearing about it. Alright. Any questions before we get started, I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen. Feel free to unmute. Now's your chance. Otherwise, hold your piece for a while.
[00:19:40] Okay. Let's get going. Today, obviously, like I said, we're gonna talk about analyzing financials. So we're going to cover why it's important to be able to do this. And then get into the how, obviously by showing you an example, and like I said today, I'm just gonna be working with the demo company.
[00:19:59] And so there's always some things about the demo companies that maybe don't have all the same features that we normally use with clients. So I will do my best to fill in the gaps. And then that's why it's important for you guys to come along with, have a client file handy, have your QuickBooks logged in and kind of ready to follow along that way if you see something different than what I have on screen, or you need more clarification you can just raise your hand, drop a question in the chat box and, and be like, Hey, like I'm seeing this, like, how would you suggest I go about doing whatever? So that's why I wanted to teach in this format to open the floor for, you know, back and forth questions. So don't be afraid to ask any questions seriously. Okay. So yeah, let's get to it.
[00:20:51] So analyzing financials is if you watch the master class, I said is like the, the first step of becoming an advisor so in this lesson, we're going to take the first step toward providing those advisory services. And during this summer sprint together, the advisory services that we're gonna be focusing on are mainly budgeting and forecasting, and just kind of having conversations with clients, helping them understand their numbers, pulling out important key performance indicators or KPIs and all that good stuff.
[00:21:23] But like in the masterclass and in the little worksheet that you have available to you in Kajabi, there's a whole bunch of other advisory type services that you can add to your arsenal. But for the purpose of this month, we're gonna be focusing on the main ones that people care about. budgeting, forecasting meeting with clients, that kind of stuff.
[00:21:44] So analyzing financials is going to increase your analytical skills. So if you came from a corporate environment, this might not be new to you, but you may find a new way of looking at things, going through this with me, or get a little reassurance that you're doing things that you should be doing anyway.
[00:22:04] Right. So that's step one. And the other reason is that it's a quality assurance review process. So as kind of in conjunction with reviewing financials for the clients, I always end up finding things that need corrections or things that we could do a little bit differently in the way that we do the bookkeeping or like things just come to my attention.
[00:22:25] And so it's a twofold thing. Like it's a quality assurance, you're making sure that your bookkeepers, if you have a team are classifying things correctly, the balance sheet is clean, all that good stuff, so that you know, when you deliver reports to your clients, they're accurate. So this lesson, like I said, it doubles as a resource for reviewing the work of the bookkeeper that you might hire in the future or bookkeepers you might already have, or even just reviewing your own work. I find mistakes on my own work too. So sometimes we get a little click happy with the bank rules or whatever, and something slips through that shouldn't right.
[00:22:59] So. Anyone here at the point in their business who has a bookkeeper and you're not quite comfortable reviewing their stuff or you wanna hire someone, but that's one of the areas that's kind of holding you back of like, yes, yes. Like, I don't know like how to make sure they're doing their job. There's lots of ways that, you know, we can make sure, but this is definitely one of, 'em also recommend using a workflow system that you can keep track of the status on things. So those two things in conjunction, you have to have a review process and you have to have a system to track people's progress.
[00:23:36] Yay. Abby, you just hired your first contractor, yippie! That's so exciting. Chelsea is planning to hire at the end of this year or sooner if needed. Sasha has 13. So she has a very effective way to check their work. Sweet. And Lorrine is ready to hire her second. Nisha is getting ready for her first two. Cool. So we have a great mix in here. I'm sure. Chelsea has some great tips too for managing a larger team.
[00:24:05] So the third reason that analyzing financials is important is this gives you the material that you need to be able to meet with your clients. So you're gonna use this review process also as a way to come up with questions, to ask your clients and to help them get clarity on their numbers when you do start meeting with them, or if you're already start meeting with them, maybe you'll be able to layer in some other stuff. And this will show that you're actually looking at the numbers and interpreting them with the clients, which is part of the advisory function, right? Without this, you can't really be a financial storyteller, which by the way, I do have a bonus for you guys, I'll unlock later today. Liz Barheight did a bonus workshop for us in my program called Financial Storytelling. So that's gonna be a really great resource for you guys as well.
[00:24:51] But you have to be able to analyze the financials to be able to get to that point of telling the financial story to your clients.
[00:24:57] And like I said, you'll be making sure the books are in good shape. So next week we'll be talking about how to prep for your client meetings, but there's gonna be some overlap that happens this week, because as you're reviewing your team's work or your own work, you will start to find things that pop out at you that you're like, I kind of probably should ask the cl the client about this.
[00:25:20] So you wanna have a process for kind of documenting that along as you go, like when you're reviewing the financials. So for example, you might just have a Google doc. If you use something like Asana, I would suggest using the overview tab in Asana where there's like the project. If you set your clients up as their own project in Asana, there's an overview and you can do a status updates in that overview. And that's how we use that function. Whoever's reviewing the financials will drop some notes and things that they found in that status update, and if it needs to go back to the bookkeeper, they will get tagged and say, here's some things that need to be corrected. Or if someone else is meeting with the client, here's some things that we need to bring up to the client that popped out on the financial statements.
[00:26:07] So yeah, click up whatever system you use, it's kind of up to you, but be consistent and just have a way to document everything as you're reviewing stuff. Even if it's like a legal pad, just make sure you put it in the system where other people are gonna be able to see it. If you have a remote team you could even use, like, we also have Slack channels for each of our clients, but they're, it's internal only.
[00:26:30] So we don't share the Slack with our clients, but we have a Slack channel assigned to each client so we can keep conversations about that client contained. So if that's the best place for you and your team to keep these type of notes maybe that would work just throwing out ideas. You guys have to pick what works best for you.
[00:26:47] So yeah.
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[00:26:54] All right, friend. I hope you enjoyed that little taste of the first week of. Elevate, like I said, that was from our summer sprint. We are running. A fall sprint starting in October. So if that's something that you want to hop in on, please go to ambitious bookkeeper.com/elevate. You can also. Direct message me on Instagram. I'm at Ambitious Bookkeeper or LinkedIn. I'm Serena shup on LinkedIn, and I would love to just talk through the decision with you. I know it's kind of a big deal. It's an investment. And I wanna make sure it's right for you. And I will be a hundred percent honest if it's not. So feel free to reach out to me. And I would love to work with you in some capacity. If not now in the future and i'll talk to you next week.
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