Latest / Advisory Secrets with Deb Halliday / From Advisor to Advisory Leader

Transcript

From Advisor to Advisory Leader · Advisory Secrets with Deb Halliday

• 0:03
  Welcome to Advisory Secrets with Deb Halladay, the bite sized podcast for accountants and bookkeepers developing their advisory skills.
• 0:12
  In this series, we're going beyond the individual advisor and exploring how to build advisory capability across your team.
• 0:21
  Because a scalable advisory service shouldn't depend on one person, let's get started.
• 0:30
  In the last episode, we talked about using real client situations to develop advisory capability across your team.
• 0:39
  And as your team becomes more capable, something else needs to change your role.
• 0:44
  For many practice owners, advisory begins with them.
• 0:48
  They're the person who knows the clients.
• 0:51
  They lead the meetings, they ask the questions, they interpret what's happening, and they guide the decisions.
• 0:58
  In the early stages, that makes complete sense.
• 1:01
  But if advisory is going to grow beyond you, at some point, your role needs to evolve.
• 1:06
  You need to move from being the advisor to becoming the advisory leader.
• 1:12
  And those are not quite the same thing.
• 1:13
  Being a great advisor is about your own capability, your ability to listen, to ask good questions, to understand the business behind the numbers, to communicate clearly, to challenge thinking, and to help clients make better decisions.
• 1:28
  Being an advisory leader is about developing those capabilities in other people.
• 1:33
  And that requires a different measure of success.
• 1:37
  Instead of asking, how many clients am I advising?
• 1:40
  You start asking, how many people am I developing who can advise clients?
• 1:44
  Well, that's a very different question.
• 1:47
  Because your value is no longer measured purely by the conversations you personally lead, it's also measured by the conversations that can happen without you.
• 1:58
  And that can be a difficult transition, particularly if advisory is the part of the job you enjoy most.
• 2:04
  You've probably worked hard to become the trusted person your clients come to.
• 2:09
  There's satisfaction in that.
• 2:11
  And there's absolutely nothing wrong with continuing to advise clients.
• 2:15
  Building an advisory team doesn't mean the owner has to stop doing advisory.
• 2:20
  The difference is that you have a choice.
• 2:23
  You can stay involved in the clients and conversations where your experience adds the most value.
• 2:29
  But you don't need to be involved in every conversation simply because nobody else can do it.
• 2:35
  And that's where leadership creates capacity.
• 2:38
  Your time starts shifting.
• 2:40
  Some of the time you previously spent answering questions may now be spent coaching your team.
• 2:46
  Instead of solving a client situation yourself, you might ask a team member how they would approach it.
• 2:53
  Instead of automatically leading the next meeting, you might help somebody else prepare to lead it.
• 3:00
  Instead of reviewing only whether the work is technically correct, you start reviewing the thinking behind it.
• 3:06
  What did they notice?
• 3:07
  What questions did they ask?
• 3:09
  What did the client say?
• 3:11
  What options did they explore?
• 3:13
  What would they do differently?
• 3:15
  Next time you're developing judgment and that is one of the most valuable things an advisory leader can do.
• 3:21
  There's another part of leadership that matters here.
• 3:24
  Creating opportunities.
• 3:26
  We can train people forever, but eventually they need somewhere to apply what they've learned.
• 3:32
  They need client exposure.
• 3:33
  They need responsibility.
• 3:35
  They need to experience what happens when a conversation doesn't go exactly as planned.
• 3:41
  And they need to know that you're there to support them while they they develop.
• 3:46
  Sometimes that means allowing somebody to to do something differently from you.
• 3:50
  Sometimes it means resisting the urge to step in.
• 3:54
  And sometimes it means accepting that a conversation doesn't have to be perfect to be valuable.
• 4:00
  And if every team member has to reach your level of experience before they're allowed to advise a client, you'll never build an advisory team because they can't gain the experience without the opportunity.
• 4:11
  Leadership is about creating that bridge, giving people enough support to feel safe and enough responsibility to grow.
• 4:19
  It also means recognizing that not everybody needs to develop in exactly the same direction.
• 4:26
  You may have someone who becomes brilliant at financial strategy.
• 4:30
  Someone else may excel at client conversations.
• 4:32
  Another person may have fantastic commercial awareness.
• 4:36
  Someone may be particularly strong at turning complex numbers into something clients immediately understand.
• 4:44
  Your job as the leader isn't necessarily to make everybody equally good at everything.
• 4:50
  It's to understand the capability across your team and bring those strengths together.
• 4:57
  That's when you stop thinking about individual advisors and start thinking about advisory capability across the firm.
• 5:06
  And there's an important mindset shift for the owner here, too.
• 5:10
  You have to become comfortable with not being needed for everything.
• 5:14
  That can sound strange, like, we've spent years building businesses where being needed can feel like proof that we're valuable.
• 5:21
  Clients need us, the team needs us.
• 5:24
  Important decisions come through us.
• 5:27
  But being needed for everything isn't necessarily a sign of a strong business.
• 5:32
  Sometimes it's a sign of dependency.
• 5:35
  And leadership is about building capability that exists even when you're not in the room.
• 5:41
  Your experience doesn't become less important.
• 5:43
  It becomes more valuable because you're using it to develop other people.
• 5:49
  One experienced advisor can only have so many client conversations.
• 5:53
  But an advisory leader can influence hundreds of conversations through the people they've developed.
• 5:59
  That's scale not simply adding more clients, but expanding the capability of the people who can support them.
• 6:07
  So here's the question I'd like you to think about after this episode.
• 6:10
  Are you measuring your success by how much advisory depends on you or by how much advisory capability you're creating around you?
• 6:20
  Because eventually, the goal isn't to be the most important advisor in your firm.
• 6:24
  It's to build a firm full of people capable of creating value for clients.
• 6:31
  And when that happens, your role changes.
• 6:34
  You're still an advisor, but you're also something more.
• 6:37
  You're an advisory leader.
• 6:39
  And in the next episode, we're going to tackle one of the biggest fears that can stop owners from making this transition.
• 6:46
  The thought that my clients only want me.
• 6:50
  Because if you've spent years building those trusted relationships, handing some of that responsibility to your team can feel risky.
• 7:00
  But client trust doesn't have to belong to one person.
• 7:04
  It can be deliberately expanded across the team.
• 7:09
  Thanks for listening to Advisory Secrets with Deb Halliday.
• 7:12
  If you're ready to develop advisory capability across your team, visit apxtraining.co.uk to explore our evergreen elearning and live implementation cohorts starting in September, February and May.
• 7:29
  You can also join our free Advisory Teams community on facebook@facebook.com groups advisoryteams.
• 7:39
  And if you'd like more podcast content, listen to Advisory Conversations with Tim Seymour and Deb Halliday, available on all major podcast platforms.
• 7:48
  I'll see you next time for another advisory secret.