By Shane Lukas, AVN
Pre-qualifying clients is one of the biggest mistakes I see when offering growth solutions (AKA advisory) to your clients.
The truth is that you have no idea what the client’s priorities are or what they want to achieve until you have a proper conversation with them. So you can’t know at the outset whether they’re right for your service or not.
This came over loud and clear during a recent webinar with two dynamic accountants, Rachael Chadwick-Harrison of Chadwick Accountants & Bookkeepers and Kathryn Webb of Torbay Accounting.
They’re both seeing strong growth with their added value services and they generously shared what they’ve learned along the way.
(By the way, both of them had previously attended my Profit Improvement Accountant Workshop so that’s what they’re referring to when they talk about a training course – more details on this at the end.)
Here’s why pre-qualifying clients costs you money plus 3 more key tips from this powerful session:
1. Pre-qualifying clients costs you money
Rachael has a client turning over just £50,000 a year who is paying a sizeable chunk of that for her Gold package, with fortnightly meetings.
How did she manage to bring such a small client on board?
Through in-depth conversations where she discovered that they’re aiming for a £300k turnover next year. They see Rachael’s support programme as the fuel to get them there, not as an overhead.
Six months earlier, by her own admission, Rachael wouldn’t have pitched her Gold package to a client that size at all. It was only after coming along to my workshop that she realised her mistake.
Kathryn comes at this from a slightly different angle but with the same result – a better uptake for her support programme.
“I was pre-qualifying people as to whether I felt that they could afford it, whether it was of interest to them. But what has been really surprising since going on the course with you guys at AVN, my whole mindset around whether it’s my responsibility to pre-qualify clients or not has changed.”
“I think it’s so important for me to make clients aware of what we do, so they can see whether the values align with their values. I let them make the decision as to whether they want it.”
2. Spot opportunities in year-end accounts
Opening up a growth solution conversation can feel awkward if you haven’t done it before.
But both Kathryn and Rachael have a simple approach that makes it easy and well within the comfort zone of any accountant. As Rachael says:
“It’s a case of looking at their year-end accounts and spotting the opportunities where they could have done better. Have they had a turnover dip, a margin dip, etc.? Then just asking, are you interested in having some help improving that? I mean, who wouldn’t say yes!”
Then there are those tell-tale comments that come up in conversation. If you’re listening out for them, you’ll realise that the client needs help.
Kathryn explained how this works:
“It could be things like, I’m not getting the results I want, or I seem to be working more hours than I’ve ever worked, but my profit is the same. Anybody that’s saying that to you would benefit from some kind of business improvement support. And that’s just a couple of statements. Once you get into this, you’ll see opportunities left, right, and centre.”
And if a client goes quiet after a pitch, Rachael follows up weeks later, asking how they’re getting on with the problem they raised.
“It’s guaranteed,” she says. “They will have done nothing.”
Which of course opens up another opportunity to ask if they want help again.
3. Price for the outcome not the hours
Both firms have deliberately uncoupled advisory fees from time spent. If the work is going to add £100,000 in turnover over 18 months, that’s what gets priced, not three hours of consulting each month.
“The time I spend on it is irrelevant,” Kathryn explains. “It might take me an hour, it might take me six hours.”
Rachael runs a similar model but adds a layer of discipline around scope: time-sheet data, fed into AI, flags when a client’s compliance requests have drifted into advisory territory. When that happens, she has no hesitation in talking to the client and explaining that the scope has changed, so the price will change too.
4. Prove your value first
Worried that sceptical clients won’t pay for this kind of support?
Kathryn offers a taster session, priced well below her usual rate at £100 + VAT.
“I see this as an opportunity to demonstrate value to my clients. It’s important you do have a fee attached to it, because I think if you do it completely for free, from a psychological point of view, it is automatically undervalued.”
“I frame it as an opportunity to explore how I might be able to help them by working alongside them. So I say to them, look, we’ll go through some of the top line items, we’ll look at pulling a few levers for you, we’ll scenario plan, we’ll cost that out. And at the end of that session, we should be able to demonstrate that the value of those changes will cover my fees many times over. If at the end of the session you feel it doesn’t, there’s no charge.”
Doing it this way means there’s no risk to the client and it doesn’t come over as a ‘sales’ meeting.
The difference this makes
The financial impact of offering these services has been phenomenal, particularly for Rachael. After a flagship client got too big and took their accounting services in house at the start of last year, the firm was left making a loss.
“For us, putting advisory services into our packages meant that come the May, June time we were back at break even. And we finally last month for the first time hit the 20% profit margin that we’d be wanting to do, which is huge for us, absolutely huge. We’ve gone from being in quite a bad loss situation all the way up to now making the kind of profits that we want to make.”
And apart from the financial side, it’s apparent just how much they love doing this kind of work.
As Kathryn said:
“I love observing the impact it has on my clients, and when I’m doing this kind of work, I am not working! This for me feels like play. To feel excited about a day where I’ve got so many of these appointments booked in my diary, or I’m doing a specific task related to this, that is joyous. To be in that position, when only a few years ago I was struggling myself with business overwhelm, and being bogged down in inefficient processes, and being the bottleneck. Now I love what I do.”
Call it advisory, call it growth solutions, call it business improvement or anything else: clients really value these services.
In September, I’m running the final Profit Improvement Accountant Workshop of 2026. As Kathryn and Rachael have discovered, it’s fantastic for launching these growth solutions services in a way that feels natural, not awkward.
- I teach you proven frameworks for having conversations with clients that go beyond the surface and lead to monthly recurring revenue.
- You get all the tools and workbooks you need to put your learning into action – and the confidence to start straight away.
- And there’s a cast iron guarantee – if you don’t win your first paying profit improvement client within 60 days of completing the certification, we’ll refund your ticket price in full.
More details and book your place here