From Practitioner to Advisor: Redefining the Profession with Douglas Slaybaugh

So here's the deal.

We're not going to talk about pricing.

I mean, we can, but we're not going to go deep into that.

But let's assume that we create the capacity now and we realize this is our opportunity to be that advisor now, to do the thing that we've been talking about for years, but haven't because we're just so busy being busy doing the work we've always done.

Do people understand that? What advisory is? Do we have to retrain? Do we have to teach? How do we get to that step?

So one of the things I've found in accounting is that how quickly a concept can become cliche.

Like take CAS, like, you know, it became cliche real quick.

And we weren't even sure if it was advisory or accounting services for a long time.

And I think we've settled now on it being accounting services.

And then the next one is trust.

It has become somewhat of a cliche and then how we build it, how we hold it, how we keep it.

Trusted business advisor became cliche.

Now advisors becoming cliche, values becoming cliche.

We very quickly just assume these words and definitions without really understanding them.

So to your point, there needs to be an education.

And within that,

so I grew up in a firm called EKS&H.

It was one of the best firms that I could have ever possibly landed at.

And it got bought by Plant Moran, I don't know how many years ago, but it was just a beautiful firm.

And we had a concept called Trusted Business Advisor, and we actually had classwork around it and levels.

So to become a Trusted Business Advisor 3, You had to cross-sell so much work.

You had to attend so many meetings.

You had to do some certain things to get to the next level.

You had to do more training, more cross-selling, more conversations, more outcomes.

And it actually had a graduated process of becoming an advisor.