From Trusted Advisor to Advisory Bottleneck

This episode looks at one of the biggest challenges with the traditional advisory model: what happens when all of the advisory knowledge, client relationships and decision-making sit with one person? Very often, the business owner or senior advisor becomes the person every client wants to speak to and every team member turns to for answers. It can feel like a sign that advisory is working — until that person becomes the bottleneck. In this episode, I talk about why I believe we need to build advisory capability across the team, rather than simply creating one brilliant advisor. I share some of my own experience of building an accountancy, bookkeeping and financial coaching firm where advisory skills existed across the team. Different people could contribute to client conversations, recognise opportunities, understand the story behind the numbers and help clients move forward. That doesn't mean everyone needs to become the lead advisor. It means the knowledge and capability shouldn't live inside one person's head. I also leave you with a question that really gets to the heart of this series: If you stepped away from your client work for three months, how much of your advisory service would continue without you? If the answer is very little, perhaps you don't have an advisory service yet. Perhaps you have an advisor. And there's a big difference. Takeaways Advisory becomes difficult to scale when everything depends on the business owner or one senior advisor. Being the person every client wants can feel like success — but it can also create a bottleneck. Advisory skills and knowledge can be developed across the wider accounting or bookkeeping team. Not everyone needs to become a lead advisor; different team members can contribute at different levels. Building capability across the team gives clients access to more knowledge while creating capacity for the owner. A useful test is to ask how much of your advisory service would continue if you weren't there. Throughout this series, we'll explore the skills, confidence, leadership and culture needed to move from one trusted advisor to a capable advisory team. Find Out More Visit APX Training to find out more about developing advisory capability across your team. Join the free Advisory Teams Facebook community for more conversations and resources around building team-delivered advisory.