Every UK firm planning the advisory shift starts with the client conversation. At our latest Leading Voice Broadcast, two practitioners argued the conversation has to start somewhere else.
In Partnership With
The dominant narrative around advisory in UK accountancy has moved consistently in one direction. Firms are being told to start with the client conversation. Build the agenda around outcomes rather than tasks, and the rest follows from there. The trade press has reinforced the framing and the professional bodies have built CPD content around it. The advisory conversation has become a conversation about how to talk to clients.
At our recent Accountancy Age and Intuit QuickBooks Leading Voice Broadcast, Ryan Diplexcito of Johnston Carmichael and Anthony Levene of Intuit QuickBooks argued the conversation has been started in the wrong place.
Diplexcito, a partner with twenty-six years in the profession and nine as a business advisory partner, used the word “accurate” four times in his presentation. He said it again in the live Q&A. The repetition was deliberate. The point underneath it was that every advisory conversation a firm has with a client is only as good as the data sitting behind it, and most firms have not done the operational work to make that data reliable yet.
“If you want to do advisory work, the first step is control of your own systems,” Diplexcito said during the session. “I cannot agree more with that.”
The reframe carries weight because it inverts the usual order. Most firms approach advisory as a client-facing capability that the operational layer supports underneath. The argument the broadcast made is that the operational layer comes first, and the client capability sits on top of it. Without clean, accurate, real-time data flowing through unified systems, the advisory conversation sits on shaky ground from the first meeting.
Anthony Levene reinforced the point from the platform side. “The AI insights are only as good as the data they’re based on,” he said. “If your data in isn’t flowing smoothly, you’ve already got a blocker there.” Levene framed the operational foundation as the prerequisite for everything else, covering bank feed reliability, app integrations, user access, and the basic plumbing of how data moves through the firm. Without that layer, the advisory pricing conversation has nothing defensible behind it.
This is the question most firms are skipping. The advisory conversation has been treated as a strategy question, when the structural shift underneath it sits in the firm’s own operating layer.
Diplexcito described what the alternative used to look like in his own practice. “I spent years having pre-year-end tax planning meetings where I’m virtually designing a set of accounts and estimating potential tax just before the meeting based on records.” The analysis happened in the room and the meeting was reactive by default. The shift, in his framing, is to a setup where the heavy lifting is done by the system and the partner walks in ready to focus on what is coming next.
For firms starting the work, Levene closed the broadcast with a practical thirty-day sequence to make the shift concrete.
Choose two to five clients with clean data and a genuine interest in advisory. Be clear internally on what advisory actually means inside the firm. Diplexcito put it directly: advisory is not free problem-solving or firefighting. The internal definition needs to be settled before the client conversation starts.
Build the pricing model around the value the firm is proposing, not the hours behind it. Have the conversation in the room with the client, not over email. Prepare a clean client snapshot built around five key numbers, such as revenue, margins, cash, and capacity.
Get a face-to-face meeting on the calendar, explain the shift to advisory directly, and use the snapshot to walk the client through what is changing and why.
The structure underneath the thirty days carries the real argument. Each phase depends on the operational layer working underneath it. Without the operational visibility behind it, every step of the sequence falls back on the partner improvising in the room.
