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4 Tips to Boost Revenues With Repeatable

Advisory Work
SEPTEMBER 4, 2020 | IN PRACTICE MANAGEMENT | BY RYAN LAZANIS

One of my favorite kinds of services to offer small business clients are repeatable advisory services.

They match well with compliance services like tax and bookkeeping, they’re easy to offer and because
clients wanted them, they’re also usually higher margin.

In fact, according to a recent 2020 report that I summarized, rms that offer repeatable advisory
services charge 65% more per client than compliance-focused rms:

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In this article, I’m going to discuss 4 simple tips for how you can boost your revenues by offering more
repeatable advisory services in your rm.
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Note: This post was sponsored by Receipt Bank. Everything discussed is my honest opinion based on
personal experience.
What Is Repeatable Advisory?
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Advisory work is loosely de ned as charging for providing advice, which is typically analytical or
forward-looking.

Repeatable advisory, therefore, is advisory work that you can perform on an on-going basis.

And I’m a big fan.

This is because you can have a standardized process to provide this service. The more standardized
processes you have, the more smooth and scalable your operation will be.

By contrast, non-repeatable advisory work can be hard on your rm’s capacity since it’s usually a big
project that must be delivered in one shot and there is no standardization involved, which means less
e ciency.

The trick then is to nd ways to deliver valuable advice on a regular basis and turn this into a service.

Below I’ll list 4 tips on how you can do so.

Tip 1: Make Bookkeeping a Staple

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In a recent article, I stated that one of the keys to scaling your rm was to mandate bookkeeping across
your client base.
But on top of that, the cornerstone of any valuable advisory service is having clean books that are up to
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I argue:

The more bookkeeping you provide, the more advisory mandates you’ll nd.

When I ran my rm, my favorite 1-2 punch to easily put together live accounting and expense data was
Xero for cloud accounting + Receipt Bank for expense and bookkeeping automation.

We had a set process for Receipt Bank to ingest the data and get it pushed right into our accounting
system:

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And because of this, we were able to achieve a timely monthly bookkeeping close for our clients.

This means that you, as the advisor, are able to spot-check the data (using tip #2 below), nd upsell
opportunities, and then deliver on those opportunities far more easily when you offer bookkeeping
versus when you don’t.
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Tip 2: Productize What You Already Do

I see a lot of accounting rms turning their offering into a subscription model, which is great.
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The problem is that they’re not always capturing the value of what they’re providing.

For example, clients typically have a lot of questions for you during the year. Some of them involve
analyzing & advising on nancial data to help with their decision making (which can be extremely
valuable).

Receipt Bank ran a recent poll on 100 accountants to see what kind of advisory services they’ve been
providing during COVID:

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Three out of four are providing nancial advice.

The question is, has this been included in your subscription plans?

If you want a very easy way to add a repeatable advisory service, the simple way is to take what you 
already do and include it as a line item in your plans. Then communicate the value of this service and
provide different levels to the service.
For instance, here was how I handled this in my last rm:
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Basically, providing advice was formalized into a meeting with the client. Since the books were up to
date (see tip #1 above), we were able to sit down formally to analyze their numbers, listen to where the
business was going and support the business with advice to help them along the way.
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You’re already doing this. You just need to formalize & structure what you’re already doing and build it
into your plans. If you do it right, you can now start charging for this advice.

Tip 3: Turn Once-Off Engagements Into Repeatable

One of the reasons why my rm was acquired only 5 years after starting it was because I had a
business model in place that ran like clockwork. To achieve this, I needed everything as standardized as
possible and to balance the inbound clients we were receiving with our team’s capacity. To best
manage our team’s capacity, we only focused on predictable, repeatable work (which in turn directly
re ected our MRR – monthly recurring revenue).

So if a client came to me for help with a cash ow forecast, I wouldn’t just provide a once-off service
here. I would turn that into a repeatable engagement.

How?

The once-off service would be to implement the cash ow forecast model. We’d gather the data and
assumptions and then build out the initial forecast.

Then, I’d bolt on a recurring update to that forecast to take into account any changes happening in the 
business and their assumptions. That would either be an annual, semi-annual, quarterly, or monthly
update.
Building out the forecast took time and was an initial hit to our capacity. But updating the model
regularly allowed us to charge a monthly price and was
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was done.

Consider how you can turn once-off engagements into repeatable ones.

Tip 4: Implement an Annual Re-Engagement Process

Most accounting rms meet with their client once a year after year-end is over. By that time, spotting
any upsell opportunities (and opportunities that help the client) is over.

By contrast, I advocate for a re-engagement meeting with each client before the year comes to an end.

If you’ve followed my advice in tip #1 above, then you’ll already have a pretty good idea of what the YTD
gures will look like just by glancing at the books:

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