It feels like there’s no good news for business right now, doesn’t it?

You’ve seen the headlines – rising costs, falling demand, regulatory pressure, tech and AI disruption, recruitment issues.

There’s no doubt that businesses, and SMEs in particular, are facing huge challenges.

But what about your own clients – what's keeping them awake at night?

Do you actually know?

Keeping up to date with the business environment is one thing; understanding the impact it’s having on individual clients is quite another.

When you meet with a client, you probably have a chat about the state of things. But do you ever drill down into what’s concerning them specifically?

If you don’t, can you really say you’re serving them in the best way?

Going beyond compliance

Many business owners are desperate for help to improve their business. Desperate not to be worrying about how they’ll pay the wages this month. But they haven’t talked to you because they don’t realise you can help.

And if you’ve never properly asked them about their business, their worries or their hopes, why would they think anything else?

I get it.

After working with thousands of accountants over the years, I know how unconfident you feel about going beyond the numbers. That’s where your skills lie, that’s where you’re on solid ground. Digging deeper is scary.

But the numbers are already telling you more than they tell your client. You can see what they can’t – if cashflow is about to hit a problem; if expenditure is climbing too high. And these are issues where you can help.

‘But I’m not an industry expert.’

Contrary to what you might believe, you don’t have to be an industry expert to go beyond compliance and do more for your clients.

Your client is the expert here. They know their industry inside out, in a way you never will. So there’s no need to pretend that you know everything.

To truly help your clients, you don’t need to tell them what to do – you simply need to ask the right questions. And then listen very hard to what your client tells you.

The right kind of questions

The right questions uncover your client’s worries, priorities and challenges, not just financial metrics. They help you to discover what really matters and where your client wants to take their business – and the rest of their life too.

Open-ended questions are the key here. They can lead anywhere, opening up discussion instead of closing it down with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ reply.  And once you know more about your client, you can see the opportunities to offer more help and support.

Try these:

• ‘If you could solve one problem in your business right now, what would it be?’
• ‘What's changed in your business over the past 6-12 months that's affecting how you operate day-to-day?’
• ‘What decisions are you putting off because you don't have the right information?’
• ‘Looking ahead 12 months, what worries you most about the business?’
• ‘How are you currently handling [the issue they just mentioned]?’

These are easy starting points. Once you feel more confident you can go deeper to find out what they want from their life beyond the business. Because for most business owners, their business is the means of them getting what they want from the rest of their life.

When you ask, ‘What kind of life do you want to be living five years from now?’ you can start to look at how their business can help them get there.

A structured framework

Is this way out of your comfort zone?

I realise that going from ‘Here’s your tax bill’ to ‘Let’s talk about your dreams’ is quite a leap.

That’s why I’ve developed a structured framework to have these conversations in a way that feels completely natural.

You don’t feel like you’re selling.

You don’t have to pretend to be something you’re not.

Your client doesn’t wonder if you’ve gone mad.

But you do give your clients the support they desperately need.

I’m running some training sessions on how to do this over the next few months. Feedback from previous sessions has been brilliant (one accountant called it ‘transformational’) and I continue to hear amazing success stories as they implement their learning.

So if you’d like to do more for your clients but don’t know where to start, I suggest you take a look and see if this is what you need to get going.

Find out more now

Shane Lukas: AVN – The Accountant’s Network