CLIENT ADVISORY SERVICES Accounting speaker
With Amy as their guide, your accounting professional audience will learn how to leverage technology’s gift of more time to create the skills needed to better connect with their clients, colleagues, and themselves.
The topics below are perfect for accounting conference keynotes and accounting firm employee events. They can scale from 1-2 hours to a full-day workshop. Add Yoga, Meditation and Book Discussion for a unique experience.
Becoming a Cherished Advisor®: How to Grow & Scale a Client Advisory Services Practice
(Leadership, Advisory, and Corporate Culture topic)
You’re passionate about what you do, and that’s why you started or lead a client advisory practice. Combining your passion and business can be both exhilarating and a struggle.
Many accounting professionals stumble into starting an advisory practice because of what they love to do. But without the experience or a roadmap of how to build a new service line or practice that your clients can’t imagine living without for efficiency and scalability, it’s easy to hit pitfalls along the way. To become a “Cherished Advisor®”—a highly valued strategic partner whom your business clients rely on to grow and thrive—you need to have a solid business foundation yourself. It’s therefore essential to put into practice the same kind of advice you give your clients.
As a CPA, consultant, and entrepreneur, Amy will share insights and best practices from her own experience of starting and growing advisory services practice independently and as a partner in accounting. She will also pull from her more than 10 years of advising thousands of firm leaders on growing and scaling their businesses. You will walk away with actionable tools, tips, and resources for creating and maintaining a solid, scalable foundation for your business for years to come.
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
Identify your passion and purpose and determine how to align it with the focus of your client advisory services practice;
List the five stages of the Cherished Advisor® journey to building a solid foundation that enables your practice to grow and thrive well into the future;
Recognize how to select technology that will meet the needs of your practice and that of the clients/vertical industries you choose to serve;
Design an end-to-end customer experience that consistently provides the high-quality level of service and engagement your clients rely on throughout the entirety of your business relationship; and,
Outline a B³ Innovation Plan with measurable goals to achieve your business objectives while staying true to your purpose.
Becoming a Cherished Advisor®: The Technology, the Process, and Practice Management
(Technology, Corporate Culture, and Change Management topic)
New technology is changing the way your clients expect to work and manage their financials. To stay relevant, accounting professionals are retooling to launch into new services and will need to acquire new skill sets, one being that of a technologist. This session will discuss why it’s important to not just implement technology to do things the same way you have always done them, but instead, rethink the business processes in your practice and the type of staffing that is needed to be successful. By doing this, you can become more efficient, productive, collaborative and create an environment of purpose that your team and clients can rally around. You will come away with an understanding of how technology’s gift of more time gives you the opportunity to become “Cherished Advisors” -- highly valued, strategic partners who are an integral part of their client's businesses and whom their clients can’t imagine living without.
In this session, attendees will gain an understanding of:
Identify your purpose as a firm;
Understand the “Cherished Advisor” journey and the different stages of innovation for your practice;
Know how to create your firm’s path to specializing in vertical industries;
Create a technology strategy and how to assess the right technology fit for your practice; and,
Re-engineer your business processes and staffing to take full advantage of the technology implemented in your firm and create new ways of collaboration with your team and clients.
Identifying the right talent: employees and/or contractors and identify the right education to empower your team
Becoming a Cherished Advisor®: Designing a Successful CAS Client Experience
Course Description:
As advisors, we strive to improve our clients’ businesses with the information we provide them. Yet many of us still spend the majority of our time keeping up with regulation and compliance as well as meeting tax deadlines. This doesn’t leave the necessary amount of time in our day to advise each client on how to improve their business results at a holistic level. During this session, we will learn how to create an end-to-end engagement, from client prospects to onboarding new clients to creating lasting relationships through regular client meetings and understanding how to interpret and communicate financial results on an ongoing basis.
Upon completion of this session, you will know how to:
Re-tool your practice to create a differentiated client experience, and develop the soft skills needed to build the collaborative advisory relationships you desire;
Create value by going beyond the numbers by telling the story behind them to help your clients make informed decisions;
Become an integral part of the business's decision-making processes, in a proactive, rather than reactive way; and,
Cultivate the interpersonal and communication skills needed to create an end-to-end client engagement experience from onboarding to ongoing client advisory work.
Gaining Firm Buy In to Create CAS Practice Success
Have you struggled with the leadership dedicating the right investment and resources to your CAS Practice? During this session we will discuss the roadblocks you may be encountering and how to overcome them, in addition to focusing on the right structure and metrics when developing your CAS strategy to create value overall and for the entire firm. With the right initiatives in place and agreed up, you can gain the results you desire to win over the leaders in your firm to support the initiatives that will help your CAS practice grow and scale.
Selecting and Creating a Tech Stack for your CAS Practice
Do you hear talk about having a “Tech Stack” and wonder if you have one at your firm? Or maybe you don’t even know where to begin? During this session, we will discuss best practices in creating a tech stack so you can have the opportunity to visualize what that could look like for your own CAS practice. Whether you deliver bookkeeping, controllership or outsourced CFO services, these solution providers will provide live demos so you can identify the technology solutions that can help you automate your practice, free up more time to spend with your clients, and to solve many of the pain points you encounter daily delivering these services.
During this session you will learn to:
Recognize how to select technology that will meet the needs of your CAS practice
Identify technology solutions that your clients in vertical industries can take advantage of for better information and time savings
Create a technology strategy and assess the right technology fit for your practice
Client Advisory Services Accounting Speaker Testimonials
“Amy was very engaging and made great points of how we need to engage our people and also engage our clients. She had some great ideas that we could implement in the firm to provide value to our clients.”
Karen McManus, Cherry Bekaert LLP, HR Senior Manager, Training and Development
“This was an excellent session. The way she described a finance professional as being a trusted and valued advisor is the way I want my clients to see me. In a world of automation and self-service, finance professionals will stay relevant by developing the skills of an advisor. I’d love to hear more from this speaker.”
Attendee of the Association for Financial Professionals’ FinNext Conference 2020
Amy has walked in your audience’s shoes. She knows all too well the pressure and level of excellence required when working for a high-performing accounting and consulting firm. Based on her own work-life journey starting out at KPMG, becoming a partner at a regional CPA firm, and transitioning to a senior accounting technology leadership role -- all while founding her own yoga studio -- Amy has learned a thing or two about what it takes to advance your career in industry while making work-life balance a key priority. Learn More
Read Amy’s latest articles:
Becoming A Cherished Advisor®: The Simple Sales Process
Course Description
Are you unable to keep up with your client advisory leads, or where you are in the sales process with potential or current clients? Many of us begin selling to prospective clients organically without a foundation to create a long-term advisory relationship and ensure we bring the right clients to our practice. The success of a new advisory client relationship starts from the discovery phase through onboarding.
In reality, the sales process never ends -- it is an ongoing relationship that you grow over time to create a long-lasting, prosperous client relationship. Breaking down your sales process and setting up the proper foundation can not only help you work with the clients you want, but it can also help you avoid taking on clients that are not a good fit. In addition, by setting up the right level of automation and back-end processes, you can generate more revenue with the clients you already know and love before bringing on new clients.
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
Evaluate and understand the collaborative selling model to create value for your potential clients and set yourself up for a successful long-term business relationship;
List and apply the five-step Simple Sales Process so that you have a framework to create a sales strategy of your own from the Discovery to the Deepening Existing Client Relationships phase; and,
Identify and develop a discovery process to truly get to know a potential prospect not only to allow them to learn more about you but also to equally assess whether they are a good fit for your practice.