How many business clients do you have?
Think about it for a moment. Get the number in your head.
Now consider this: how many of those clients would benefit from you having a better conversation with them about where their business is going?
Maybe not all of them, but certainly some. Maybe quite a few.
The difficulty is that better conversations don’t necessarily happen just because we intend to have them. We get into a meeting, there are accounts to discuss, tax matters to cover and questions the client wants answered. Before we know it, the meeting is over.
That is why, if you want to do more advisory work, I think you need to change the default meeting.
Don’t rely on remembering to do things differently
There is a reason pilots use a pre-flight checklist. They don’t use it until they become experienced enough to remember everything and then abandon it. They use it every time.
Surgeons have pre-operative and post-operative checklists for much the same reason.
These are highly skilled, experienced professionals. The checklist isn’t there because they don’t know what they’re doing. It helps ensure that important things happen consistently.
I think there is a useful lesson here for accountants.
If you decide that you want to have better business conversations with clients, don’t simply tell yourself to ask better questions at your next meeting. Put those questions on the agenda.
The agenda then becomes more than a list of things to discuss. It helps you do things differently until a different way of working becomes a habit.
The difference between a reasonable question and a useful one
Suppose you want to understand where a client wants their business to go.
You could ask:
“What’s the goal for your business?”
Or:
“What’s your definition of winning for your business?”
Or perhaps:
“What does success look like for your business in three years’ time?”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of those questions. But compare them with this:
“What do you want your net profit to be in three years’ time?”
For many clients, that is a much more useful business growth question.
It signposts the future, it is specific and it gives you something tangible to explore. And if the client has already talked about their current net profit, it connects the question directly to something they have told you.
That last point matters. Good advisory isn’t about working your way mechanically through a bank of clever questions. It is about listening and then asking the question that helps the client think more clearly about their business.
Then explore what might get in the way
Once you have established where the client wants to get to, the natural next step is to explore the obstacles.
Again, there are plenty of questions you could ask:
“What obstacles are getting in the way?”
“What’s holding you back from the results you want?”
“What do you think will get in the way of achieving your three-year goals?”
All perfectly reasonable.
But if the client has just told you the profit they want to achieve, I might ask:
“What do you think might stop you generating your three-year profit target?”
Notice what has happened.
We haven’t suddenly become experts in the client’s industry. We haven’t told them what their strategy should be. We have simply helped them move from a vague discussion about wanting the business to do better towards a more useful conversation about a specific destination and what might prevent them reaching it.
That is often where valuable advisory conversations begin.
Put the good questions on the agenda
When I’m working with an accountant who wants to develop their advisory work, one of the things I’m interested in is not only what they intend to do differently, but how they will make sure it actually happens.
Many accountants try to skip that step.
You can attend training, write down half a dozen excellent questions and fully intend to use them. But three weeks later, when you’re sitting opposite a client and dealing with everything else on your mind, will you remember them?
Maybe.
I’d rather design the process so you don’t have to remember.
Put the good questions on your meeting agenda. Use them repeatedly. Refine the wording as you learn what gets clients thinking and talking. Eventually, this way of having conversations becomes much more natural.
The structure supports you while you develop the habit.
The GUIDE model for advisory work
The same principle applies beyond individual client meetings.
Advisory work isn’t everyone’s priority, and I don’t think every accountant needs to turn themselves into a business adviser. But if advisory is something you want to offer, structure matters.
My GUIDE model provides a simple framework:
G – Gather
Explore the client’s situation, goals and challenges.
U – Understand
Analyse their historic data to get the full picture.
I – Interpret
Turn your analysis into insights and scenarios.
D – Design
Build reports, forecasts and plans that highlight your advice.
E – Engage
Meet regularly to review progress and refine the strategy.
The value of a framework like GUIDE isn’t that every client gets exactly the same advice. They shouldn’t.
It is that you have a consistent process for getting to the advice.
The questions you ask, the numbers you explore and the conclusions you reach will vary from client to client. The framework makes it less likely that important parts of the advisory process are missed.
Consistency without becoming formulaic
There can sometimes be a resistance to processes and checklists in advisory work because we want conversations with clients to feel natural.
I understand that. But structure and personalisation aren’t opposites.
A pilot’s checklist doesn’t determine how every flight will unfold. A surgical checklist doesn’t make every operation identical. In the same way, an advisory framework doesn’t tell you what advice to give a client.
It gives you a reliable starting point from which to apply your professional judgement.
And perhaps that is the bigger opportunity.
You probably don’t need another hundred advisory questions. You may only need a handful of good ones, asked at the right time and followed up properly.
So go back to that number of business clients you had in your head at the beginning.
The question isn’t how many of them you could sell an advisory service to.
A better place to start might be: with how many of them could you have a better business conversation at their next meeting?
Then put the questions that will help you have that conversation on the agenda.
