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One of the questions I was asked recently was why so many accounting professionals struggle to price advisory services confidently.
My answer had very little to do with pricing.
I believe the bigger challenge is the shift from being viewed as a compliance provider to becoming a strategic financial partner. And while the accounting profession has been talking about that transition for years, I don't think we've fully appreciated how much it changes the relationship we're asking clients to have with us.
It's not simply a matter of offering additional services or adopting a different pricing model. We have to change how we think about the value we create, and then we have to be able to explain that value in a way our clients understand.
For decades, accounting professionals have built successful practices around delivering accurate financial information, meeting deadlines, and helping clients satisfy their reporting and compliance obligations. That work is important, and clients understand why they need it.
We've also learned to associate our value with the work we perform. We know how much time a tax return takes, what's involved in preparing financial statements, and the effort required to maintain accurate books. Those activities are familiar, measurable, and relatively easy to describe.
Advisory changes the conversation.
Consider a business owner whose revenue is increasing but whose cash position continues to deteriorate. Preparing accurate financial statements provides important information but helping that owner understand why the business isn't generating the cash they expected requires something different.
We have to look beyond the numbers, understand how the business operates, recognize the conditions contributing to the problem, and help the owner evaluate what needs to change.
The value isn't simply in the analysis we perform or the time we spend discussing it. It's in helping the owner understand something about their business they couldn't see clearly before and make a better decision because of it.
If we're still measuring that value primarily by how long the work takes, we're going to struggle to price it differently.
Here's where I think many advisory conversations break down.
We may understand that we're offering something more valuable, but when it's time to explain the engagement, we describe monthly meetings, financial reviews, dashboards, and access to our expertise.
Those are things we'll do. They don't necessarily explain why the client should care.
A business owner doesn't want another financial review simply because it's available. They want to know whether they can afford to hire, why their working harder without keeping more money, or whether an expansion will improve profitability.
Our responsibility is to connect the work we're proposing to the decisions they are trying to make and the consequences of continuing without that understanding.
That requires us to ask different questions, listen differently, and communicate differently. Instead of leading with what our advisory package includes, we need to understand what's happening in the client's business and help them recognize why having a different kind of financial relationship matters.
We can't assume clients will recognize the value simply because we've labeled something advisory.
If we can't clearly explain what will be different for the client, why would we expect them to understand why the price is different?
I don't believe accounting professionals need another reminder that advisory represents an opportunity. What we need is a deeper understanding of what becoming a strategic financial partner actually requires of us.
It changes how we recognize value, how we communicate with clients, and how we define the responsibility we're taking on in their businesses.
And it requires us to become comfortable having conversations that go beyond explaining financial results to exploring what those results mean and what the client may need to do differently.
Until we make that shift ourselves, we're likely to keep describing advisory in terms of activities, defending our fees in terms of time, and wondering why clients don't immediately recognize the difference.
Before we can confidently price a different kind of relationship, we have to understand it well enough to explain why it matters.
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