How to analyze your client portfolio to find an advisory niche
Like any other undertaking, building a valuable advisory service offering means you need to make a plan.
Take our partner survey to get started
As a first step, we highly recommend taking our Partner Fit Survey, not just because we’ll give you a free assessment on your advisory opportunity, but because we have specifically designed the questions to frame how the best accountants prepare to offer this new service.
Important planning considerations we cover in the survey include:
How many clients you currently have vs how many you want
Your current service offering and how advisory work may fit that offering
How you market and sell your services
The size of your team to frame implementation
Receptiveness to new technology (we can help with the sticklers too 👍)
Your growth strategy
The niche you want to target
Identify your target niche
No doubt you have heard this before, everyone talks about it. But at Malartu we encourage our partners to first focus on a niche because valuable advisory services are not general.
You wouldn’t give a dentist the same advice you give a startup, so your advisory offers shouldn’t be boilerplate either.
Segmenting your portfolio will quickly make it clear where to start, and subsequently frame your entire implementation.
We recommend segmenting your client portfolio by:
Client company size
Accounting software (cloud-based vs on-prem, get as specific as possible)
Industry
Sector
Growth trajectory (high-growth, maintaining size, fixing to sell, etc.)
Based on these segments you can specifically frame your niche. Something like, “High-growth dental clients with 5-10 associates who are using (or willing to use) QuickBooks Online”
And perhaps the most important step to finalizing your target niche:
Don’t just pick your most popular niche in your current client base, choose the niche you *want* to work with. Who are your favorite customers? What is that persona?
This last piece is imperative to not just building a good business with plenty of work, but one that is fulfilling.