Your clients are experts in their business, but you’re the expert in financial reporting. Confidently delivering forward-looking financials is how you’ll drive value for clients and meet your goals together.
But how’s an accountant, comfortable with numbers and metrics, able to translate these for clients who are so focused on their business that it’s difficult to catch their breath?
Advisors need to be comfortable with financial storytelling. The numbers need to mean something to clients, enough to build their understanding, confidence, and motivation.
As a service provider, you gain distinct benefits from getting better at financial storytelling. Specifically:
Of course, clients benefit from receiving a service tailored to their unique goals, and knowing their accountant is paying attention to what matters most to their company!
Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) is a form of financial storytelling that emphasizes financial storytelling to meet client goals with regular touchpoints and forward-looking financials.
Every question you ask can be tied back to the metrics and financial reporting you provide. Regularly asking these questions to clients will help you make sure they’re on the right track, even if their goals or situation changes.
Simply asking this can be part of your standard questions to regularly discuss with each client. When you can work towards solving someone’s anxieties and worries, you’re making a real change in a person’s quality of life and providing value on many levels.
This approach also builds trust, which means your clients will be comfortable coming to you with issues that you can help them solve before they get in over their heads.
Ensure you tie your forward-looking financials regularly to these three areas, asking these questions of your client when considering approaches to support your client:
1) Risks: What are things that could take your business off the projected path?
2) Opportunities: What things might come up that are worth breaking off the planned path?
3) Countermeasures: What are alternative approaches that can get your client back on track?
Financial storytelling with these questions will allow you to paint the picture of what could happen if each of these scenarios came true. You’ll be able to explore the impact on client goals and metrics and plan a course of action that makes your client feel comfortable if particular scenarios come to light.
Our article: How Firms Can Build Confidence in Advisory Discussions shares tips for having conversations with clients.
Client engagements should start and end with their story in mind.
The story isn’t metrics such as cutting expenses or increasing revenue, the story is what goals will be met for your client. If your client wants more revenue, there is more than one way to achieve it, but you’ll need to learn more about their story to figure out the different options.
If you focus on metrics alone, without going deeper, you may fill the gaps with assumptions based on your previous clients. This is a common mistake that we make as humans, and it’s worth stepping back to make sure we’re never imposing our own stories on clients.
Plus, clients are people first and foremost. Everyone is the star of their own story, and they will appreciate the trust and relationship building when you take the time to really see their goals.
Forward-looking financials must be tailored to each client. Even if you have four clients who want to increase their revenue by $1M this year, they may have completely different motivations and paths forward.
Client 1: Wants to add 10 more employees
Client 2: Hopes to improve their long-term operating cash flow
Client 3: Aims to sell the company and wants to attract buyers
Client 4: Wants more free time to spend with family
Each client is going to need different monthly reporting and metrics to achieve these goals. But if you hadn’t asked them the right questions as to why they wanted to increase their revenue, you wouldn’t be able to provide the right storytelling for their cases.
Listening to clients with empathy and consistently revisiting questions to understand their stories is the key to delivering forward-looking financials with confidence. Once you’ve had these conversations, using the right tools can make delivering the reports easier for everyone involved.
Jirav started because our team realized that building forecasts should be easier for everyone involved. We’ve worked hard to build an FP&A software tool that is easy to use and doesn’t break the bank for our clients. Schedule a demo call to see how we can help you tell your clients’ financial stories.