Supporting, advising and training a chartered accountancy practice
Alison is a partner at Liles Morris, a chartered accountancy practice. The firm works across various sectors with individuals, sole traders, not-for-profits, and companies to provide financial accounting, tax support and probate services.
Alison first met Louise when she was delivering a talk about how to grow out of your Comfort Zone. Impressed by Louise’s professionalism and knowledge, Alison approached her, and they started working together.
The working relationship started with a business development review, which, among other things, recommended focusing on task prioritisation and delegation, streamlining processes and more effective planning. Alison and Louise began working together for 90 minutes once a fortnight. Together, they created a plan that they worked through, focusing their sessions on specific topics while allowing enough flexibility to review things that had come up.
Louise’s small business advisor service supported Alison and her team in several ways. Here are some of the most substantial impacts thus far:
Getting to grips with time management
As the business owner, Alison needed space to think beyond client work – putting time aside to develop her team, strategic practice work, and personal development.
Louise’s guidance proved invaluable in helping Alison reclaim her time. This involved implementing a more structured work schedule, dedicating three days per week to fee-paying work and two days to business development tasks. This predictable routine clarifies her meeting availability and allows the team to plan more effectively. Setting up out-of-office email notifications manages client expectations, further enhancing her time management skills.
With these working days in place, Alison started to benefit from time-blocking. This allowed her to make deeper progress instead of trying to multi-task. As part of this, she took Louise’s advice of using a priority grid to segment her work. She now focuses on handling the tasks in the ‘important, not urgent’ quadrant before they become ‘important and urgent’.
As a client-facing business, client demands occasionally exceed the time available, for example, during the January tax return season. Louise is supporting Alison in addressing the January ‘crunch’ by creating a pricing structure that incentivises clients to submit earlier tax returns. This will reduce the pressure on Liles Morris and make the January rush jobs more palatable due to higher fees.
As a result, Alison has a more structured approach and can better manage her workload, supporting a healthier work-life balance. She no longer needs to work at weekends – an enormous step forward – and is working towards a four-day week, which would have been unthinkable before starting work with Louise’s small business advisor service.
Building stronger, more effective relationships
As a certified DISC trainer, Louise conducted a full DISC review and training session with Alison. In addition to providing insight into her personality strengths and blind spots, Alison could start identifying those of her team and clients.
With this knowledge, she understands her clients better and communicates with them more effectively. For example, as a detail-focused person, Alison prefers to provide detailed information. However, she now identifies those clients who do not want detailed emails and adapts her approach. This allows her team to align communication styles with their clients’ needs and save time – a double bonus!
This insight supports the Liles Morris client onboarding process, too. The team now asks for communication preferences when onboarding new clients, ensuring a more tailored service.
DISC training has also given Alison an insight into how she and her team can work together more effectively. As a next step, she will start using DISC to support her team’s annual reviews. This will help define development goals and allow the team to work together more effectively- to expand their skills. It will also play an important role in how the entire team communicates with their clients.
Upskilling the Liles Morris team
Louise has played a crucial role in training Alison’s team. This has ranged from whole-team training on topics such as the comfort zone and DISC to one-on-one training for marketing.
Louise shared insight and tools that allowed the practice manager to start owning and managing marketing for the business. This includes creating a marketing plan, writing keyword-rich blogs, using ChatGPT to support the creative process, and optimising LinkedIn and Google Business. As a result, Liles Morris now has a consistent, high-quality presence on social media, demonstrating their expertise.
With Louise on hand to train the team, Alison saves time and believes the training is more effective. Bringing in an authoritative third party means the Liles Morris team are getting more out of their training and making bigger shifts in how they operate.
Introductions to trusted service providers
Liles Morris has benefitted from Louise’s network of trusted service providers. This has included successful introductions to a copywriter to write their new probate service webpage, a marketing agency to work on a logo refresh, and a marketing coach who is creating templates for consistent and professional social media posts. Additionally, Louise introduced them to a new IT supplier who installed server software and structures that were more appropriate to their business size. As well as being more secure, the new arrangement gives Liles Morris greater flexibility with its IT contract by separating IT support from the licensees.
Getting closer to their clients
Louise showed Alison how to compile and create an online market research survey, which is now collecting responses. She also demonstrated how to obtain client feedback through review calls. These calls allowed the team to request testimonials proactively. At the time of writing, they have 14 excellent reviews, of which 13 have been given since working with Louise.
Small business advisor and support
With Louise’s support, Alison is leading her business more efficiently and seeing the benefit of this in every direction.
On a personal level, Alison has reduced her out-of-hours work by improving the structure of her working day, prioritising her workflow more effectively and delegating tasks. Alison believes she’s reduced her time commitments by around 10% per week; this has a knock-on effect on her wellbeing and work-life balance and will, in turn, support her overall productivity.
Her team are benefitting too. Louise’s training has provided new knowledge which makes work more rewarding and interesting. From marketing skills development to learning how to communicate with different client types, the team are better able to support Alison’s goals. As part of this, Liles Morris is now established as a visible, authoritative local accountancy practice, with regular, client-relevant content and a growing suite of positive client recommendations to support their work.
What’s more, Alison has been able to leverage Louise’s DISC services to ensure more tailored employee reviews – a brilliant way to ensure ongoing employee engagement.
It almost goes without saying that the Liles Morris client base is seeing the benefit of these changes with faster turnaround times and a more tailored approach to their requests.
Alison’s ambitions for Liles Morris mean she’s keen for Louise’s ongoing support with projects such as a deeper analysis of client types and personality profiles and implementing the tiered pricing model to incentivise earlier tax return submissions. Alison is also keen to review the entire sales process qualification to onboarding, cross-selling and beyond and is confident that with Louise’s professional support, Liles Morris will continue to go from strength to strength.
