Point A to Point B

Speaker A: Foreign. Hey there firm owners. I'm Ryan Lazanis and you're listening to the Future Firm Accounting Podcast, the place where you'll get one practical lesson each episode to help you unlock freedom and growth in your firm. This episode is sponsored by Meridian. Meridian is the AI operating system for accounting firms. It runs your month end close so one accountant can carry a million dollar book and still have a life book. A demo@meridian.pilot.com future-firm thanks for tuning in today. I want to start with something that sounds almost too simple to matter, and yet I think a lot of firms get it wrong without realizing it. Your clients don't really want bookkeeping. They don't want a tax return either, not as an end in itself. What they want is for you to help them get from point A to point B. What do I mean by that? Point A is wherever their business currently feels messy, stressful, or stuck. Maybe cash flow is unpredictable. Maybe they have no idea if they're profitable. Maybe they're drowning in receipts and have no real visibility into their own numbers. Point B is the version of their business running smoothly, where they understand their financial picture and where the stress of not knowing has been replaced with a clear sense of direction. The tax return and the bookkeeping are just the vehicle, and what they're paying for is the movement from A to B. Why is this distinction important? Well, if you can help a client make that move from A to B, attracting premium clients gets noticeably easier. And so does keeping the ones you already have. Clients are much less likely to leave a firm that's visibly changing their business for the better. They're more likely to start looking elsewhere when the firm feels interchangeable. And once a client can't articulate what specifically you did for them beyond filing paperwork on time, you've become exactly the kind of easily replaceable vendor that gets shopped against a cheaper competitor at the first opportunity. So the obvious next question is how do you go about doing this? The answer is that it all starts with a proper diagnosis. You can't help someone get from point A to point B if you've never taken the time to understand where point A is for them. Every client's point A looks different. One business owner's mess is a cash flow problem, another's is a pricing problem they haven't recognized yet. And another's might be a team that's draining their margins. If you skip the diagnosis, you'll end up offering the same generic service to everyone. Which is exactly what makes a firm start to feel replaceable in the first place. Once you've diagnosed a client's situation, properly building a real plan for them becomes dramatically easier. That plan might involve tax planning, opportunities you spotted while going through their numbers, profit maximization strategies specific to how their business makes money, or something else entirely. Say a diagnosis reveals that a client's real bottleneck isn't their bookkeeping at all. It's that they're pricing 3 of their product lines below cost without their awareness. Now that leads to a completely different conversation and a completely different plan than the one you'd have proposed if you just quote quoted them a standard monthly package without the diagnosis step, you would have missed that the plan should be downstream of the diagnosis, not the other way around. Uh, let me share a bit of how I think about this inside my own higher tier coaching work. When we take on a firm at that level, the diagnosis phase is comprehensive, going well beyond two or three surface level questions and digging into the problems and goals sitting underneath the surface. Only once we've got a real textured picture of where that firm currently stands do we build out a personalized plan for them. That execution piece is just as critical as the diagnosis itself. I know what some of you might be thinking at this point. A deep diagnostic process sounds great in theory, but you simply don't have the time to run one for every single client who comes through the door. That's a fair concern, and I'm not suggesting you interrogate a $500 a month bookkeeping client for two hours before you'll agree to take them on. The depth of the diagnosis should scale scale with the size and complexity of the engagement. A smaller, more straightforward client might be well served by a handful of sharp, well chosen questions on your discovery call, enough to get a real sense of their point A without turning a simple onboarding into an interrogation. A larger client or anyone you're hoping to bring into a genuine advisory relationship, on the other hand, deserves real time and real structure instead. I shared a version of this idea on LinkedIn recently, and one response in particular stuck with me. A CPA named Jason Rideout, who works as a tax and business advisor to owner managed companies, talked about a tool his own firm built specifically for this purpose. He calls it something like an owner cash Trap index, and what it does is diagnose the gap between what a business generates and what the owner can personally access after tax, a number he says almost nobody has ever calculated for themselves before they were asked. His point was that this is the starting point for every single advisory conversation they have. Once an owner sees that specific number clearly in front of them, the plan for closing that gap essentially builds itself. That's a great example of diagnosis functioning as a real business tool rather than just an internal process step. It also shows that this concept scales well beyond a one on one coaching relationship. Some firms take this even a step further further and turn a version of their diagnosis into something prospective clients can experience upfront before they've even signed on as a client. Think of a short assessment, a quick calculator, or a simple set of questions that quickly reveal someone's specific pain points and hands them back a handful of concrete next steps they could take. Done well, that gives a prospect a taste of the kind of thinking they get by working with you, rather than just a generic pitch about your services. It's essentially the diagnosis step packaged as a lead generation tool instead of something that only happens after someone's already signed an engagement letter. You don't need anything fancy or automated to pull this off either. Even a simple one page worksheet you walk a prospect through live on a call covering their revenue trends, their biggest current frustration, and what they're trying to achieve over the next year accomplishes the same thing. The important thing is the diagnostic thinking in front of the person before you ever quote them a price. To make this a bit more concrete, a real diagnostic question set usually covers a handful of distinct areas rather than just one. There's the financial picture itself, things like cash flow patterns, margin by service or product line, and where money is leaking out of the business. The operational side matters just as much, covering how the owner is spending their time day to day, and where bottlenecks show up repeatedly. Then there's the goals piece, which covers where the owner wants the business to be in one to three years, not just what's currently bothering them. And finally, there's the emotional piece covering what's keeping the owner up at night, which is frequently different from whatever problem they'll casually mention first. A diagnosis that only covers the financial numbers and skips the other three areas will still miss a large part of what's going on. A better, stickier service in this industry and has almost everything to do with continuously helping your client move toward their goals, not with the specific list of deliverables sitting in your engagement letter. Properly diagnosing their situation is the starting point for making any of that happen at all. If you want to put this into practice in your own firm, here's how to start before your next new client engagement, or even with an existing client you've been serving on autopilot for a while, sit down and build a real list of diagnostic questions specifically specific to your niche or service line. The goal behind these questions is to get beneath the surface of what's going on in their business. Ask about their goals and not just their current problems, and ask what success would look like to them in concrete terms rather than in vague language like wanting things to run smoother. Once you've got real answers to those questions, you'll usually find the plan you should be proposing becomes obvious because you'll know what they need. And if you're worried this will make your discovery calls run long. In my experience, the opposite happens. Uh, a structured diagnosis can shorten the sales process because you stop circling around vague problems and start speaking directly to the thing the client cares about. This actually helps deals close faster. M Hopefully that helps. And if you want more help, be sure to check out my future Firm Accelerate Program. We'll help you unlock freedom and growth in your firm through proven systems, expert coaching, and a like minded community of hundreds of others just like you. Building a real diagnosis process into how you take on and serve clients is exactly the kind of foundational work we help members put in place inside the program, and it's one of the highest impact changes a firm can make in a single quarter. For more info, just head on over to www.futurefirmacccelerate.com. so that's all for today. Hope you found today's episode helpful. Go build that list of diagnostic questions before your very next client. Call and I'll catch you in the next one. Take care.