Tracey Jones of Whitecross Accountancy explains how working with AVN improved her confidence, her revenue and her profitability:
I think I’d made every classic mistake in the book, the ones an accountant makes when they decide to start their own practice.
For a while, as a startup, you make a bit of money. You’re desperate for cash flow and it works okay to begin with. But as you try to grow the firm, you realise you haven’t got the basics in place. You get to a point where you’re effectively working too much for too little. You’ve no boundaries with your clients, which only adds to the pressure. Emails and messages come in late in the evening that you feel obliged to respond to, and no time left for yourself. After a while it just grinds you down, and I ended up pretty much at rock bottom. That was really where I was when I first got in touch with AVN.
Honestly, I was just about ready to give up. When you’re working all those hours for such little return, it’s almost tempting to say, “I’m going to give it all up and go back to employment.” But that’s a shame, because you’ve worked so hard to establish your business and you don’t want to let it go without a fight. AVN was my chance to put it back on the straight and narrow and get it to where it needed to be.
Working with AVN helped me find the value I was giving away
We’ve all heard for years that advisory is the way forward. But the tricky bit is that we’re quite traditional as accountants. We get stuck in a rut, and you don’t really have a clear vision of what advisory even encompasses. A lot of us are already doing advisory without being conscious of it, so we’re not demonstrating the value to our clients and we end up giving it away for free.
That’s exactly what I’d been doing. I’d fallen into it with some of my clients, and working with my AVN coach Kerry helped me realise I could formalise it. I could actually demonstrate the value and show clients this was a real service we provided, rather than an add-on I threw in for free with the compliance work.
The AVN tools gave me structure
First and foremost, the AVN tools give you structure. Most of us do a bit of advisory off the cuff — a client asks a question, you say “yes, I can knock up a spreadsheet for that.” Starting with Time’s Up, the AVN pricing tool, you actually list down the things you can do and build a structure around them. Then, using tools like Benchmarking and OnTrack, you can formalise what you’re doing and demonstrate the value to clients. You’ve got a product you can actually show them.
OnTrack gives clients a visual, a starting point you can use to open up a conversation. You can sit down and say, “Look, you can see here what this is showing,” and it gives you that leapfrog to say, “Actually, we could help with this.” Benchmarking does what it says: it helps clients benchmark their business against others in their industry.
When someone tells you “you need to supply advisory services,” it’s very easy to get hit with overwhelm and not know where to start. The AVN tools give you that system and that starting point, and they stop the feelings of overwhelm.
AVN gave me the confidence to take the leap
The biggest thing for me was the coaching with Kerry giving me the confidence to actually do it. She got me to shift my mindset. I’ve always liked chatting with my clients and finding out what they’re up to, but now I go into a meeting able to ask, “Okay, what can we help with?” I’d never really said it like that before, and quite often it opens up the floodgates. You realise there are all sorts of things you can help your clients with.
When I started putting suggestions to some of my long-standing clients, the comment I kept getting back was, “I didn’t realise you could do that for us.” Just having the confidence to have those conversations has led to a huge amount of new work.
The difference AVN has made
For the firm, it’s definitely improved revenue and profitability. We’re now charging for work we’d previously been giving away for free, and we’re doing more work for the same clients. So while the client base hasn’t necessarily grown, the revenue and profitability have.
For me personally, it’s been great. The more I’ve done, the more I’ve realised this is the part of the job I really enjoy. I’ve had some lovely feedback from clients about how we’ve helped them. They just feel better about their businesses and know there’s someone who’s got their back. Most of my clients are very small businesses, often sole directors with no board and no one else to talk to about their ideas or how they’re feeling about the business. That’s something we can put in place and be there for them.
I’d given up a partner salary at a larger firm, and ultimately that’s where I wanted to get back to. Having made just about every mistake in the book with my startup, it took an awful lot longer than I anticipated. But working with AVN, things turned round much, much faster — and I’m much more where I need to be now.