Accountants: Business Coaches are Your Competitors. Here’s How to Beat Them.

When performing tax work, your competition is clear: other CPAs and enrolled agents.

When performing bookkeeping work, your competition is clear: other bookkeeping and accounting firms (and, of course, software like QuickBooks and services like Bench).

But…when you start getting into business advisory and outsourced CFO work you enter into another competitive territory. You start competing with business coaches.

And there’s a ton of them.

However, you have a strategic advantage and if you leverage your strategic advantage, you’ll not only eliminate them as a competitive threat — you’ll end up creating a blue ocean business for yourself in the sea of ‘red ocean’ business coaches.

Business Coaching is a Big Business

Business coaching is a big business. There’s a few great coaches, plenty of mediocre coaches, and a ton of bad business coaches.

There’s a lot of coaches because everyone thinks they can be a coach. Why?

For one, there’s a ton of demand. There’s a lot of struggling businesses out there. According to the Small Business Administration, most businesses fail. Most business owners would welcome help from someone whom they can trust to tell them what to do to have a successful business. (This, of course, is why you’re perfect for the role of business advisor — as a financial professional, you already have trust built. Most business owners inherently trust accountants).

The second reason why there are a lot of bad business coaches is because the barrier to entry is very low. It doesn’t take any type of formal training or having credentials for someone to call themselves a business coach. Hair stylists must jump through more hoops to open a business than a business coach does!

For these two reasons, there are a ton of business coaches on the market.

So, how do you, when entering the market of ‘business advisory’ or ‘outsourced CFO services’ separate yourself from the competition?

Here’s three ways you can separate yourself from the multitudes of generic business coaches:

Way #1: Promote the fact that you give advice specific to your clients’ business instead of doing what most business coaches do — dole out generic advice rooted in business theory.

Here’s how most business coaching works:

Business coach gives business owner generic advice.
Business owner implements the advice.
Business owner doesn’t see an improvement in their business.

The coach blames the implementation. The owner blames the advice.

Here’s the real problem: most business coaches learn their ‘coaching methodology’ from a guru or a theory-heavy management system and then try to make their client fit within this system instead of giving specific advice based on the unique nuances of their clients’ businesses.

We all know that every business is different. Most business coaches do a disservice to their clients because they force their client to fit a mold when not one business on earth fits that exact mold.

Way #2: Promote the fact that you focus on improving the one thing that matters: cash flow.

There are generally two types of business coaches: ‘industry specific coaches’ who are experts at a particular industry (e.g., HVAC business coaches) and ‘skill specific coaches’ that are experts at a particular skill that the business owner lacks (e.g., leadership coaches, sales coaches).

The problem with both of these types of coaches is that they give advice without understanding the financial implications of their advice.

Most business coaches do not have an adequate grasp on the one thing that matters: how to give advice that will increase the amount of cash their client’s business generates.

Most business coaches focus on things like sales, operations, and systems. The problem, of course: businesses live and die on cash.

Nothing else is as important.

Sales are not as important as cash. Profit is not as important as cash.

A business can last years with poor sales and poor profit. But it can’t last long with poor cash.

Most business coaches give advice without understanding if that advice will help the business increase the amount of cash the business generates. You, of course, know better (or, at least, can know better if you go through our training program!).

Way #3: Promote the fact that, unlike most business coaches, you can measure the ROI of working together.

As financial professionals, we know that a business should only spend money on something if it will produce a return.

A business coach should be treated the exact same. Whenever a business owner spends money on a business coach, they should expect to see a return.

As a financial professional, you can promote that measuring the results of your engagement is at the heart of everything you do — you’re a numbers person after all! At the end of each month and year, the business owner can see — in black and white — if they have improved or not. Most business coaches cannot say this.

(By the way, most business owners will still want to continue working with you even if they declined in performance because they value the ability to talk to someone they trust on a regular basis that understands them and their business).

We should be so confident in our ability to generate a positive ROI for our clients that we’re willing to fire ourselves if we fail to do so. We’ve said this to clients for years — and we’ve never had to fire ourselves. Not once.

Here’s the bottom line. Business owners need help. We, as financial professionals, have a unique opportunity to help them by offering a business advisory service.

Because we’re now competing with generic ‘business coaches’ here are three ways we can be different:

We can be different by giving advice specific to our clients’ business instead of doing what most business coaches do — dole out generic advice rooted in business theory.

We can be different by focusing on improving the one thing that matters: cash flow.

We can be different by measuring the ROI of working together.

This post is written by Adam Lean, co-founder of TheCFOProject.com where we provide trainings, tools, and resources to help financial professionals build, grow and scale a business advisory service that gets results. Have any feedback or suggestions? Send an email to adam@thecfoproject.com.

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