August 7, 2019
It’s no secret that Fathom provides business performance insights which advisors can use to add value to their clients. However, taking the time to ensure your clients realise this value is a vital step that many advisors may find difficult to prioritise.
Fathom produces customised and branded performance reports that pull together data on KPIs, Profitability, Cash Flow, Trends, Goals, and more. However, when you send out these reports to your client, do you feel as though they read and take on-board all the information inside?
Are they using these insights to make better decisions and grow their business? Or does your report sit in an email folder, unread and forgotten?
Even when clients do engage with your reports, they might glance over areas they don’t understand or wish to explore deeper.
Too often, these conversations with the advisor are pushed back or neglected because the client is too busy or too shy to speak up. Being able to have a conversation in the moment about what they’re seeing means you’re more likely to capture these questions.
That’s why Ken LaCroix at Insightful Partners, a progressive advisory firm in the US, has started using Fathom in a different way.
An advisory meeting is a discussion between an advisor and a client about the client’s business performance.
Typically, an advisor will walk the client through key insights, covering off KPIs, profitability, cash flow, trends, goals, and more. The client is able to ask questions in regards to past and future performance.
During this meeting, the advisor and the client can challenge ideas, stimulate thinking, and ask the right questions to unlock business insights.
Ken’s company operates on the mantra, ‘what gets measured, gets done.’ In addition to reviewing the standard financial statements of a business, Ken drills down even deeper to give business owners additional insights.
His firm provides analysis for making strategic decisions while monitoring and supporting the business to reach its goals.
The meetings enable clients to truly understand their financial results and, in Ken’s words, “focus on the signals, not the noise.”
As part of his service package, Ken invites stakeholders to a regular meeting – either in-person or via Zoom – to go over their financial insights. These meetings help the Insightful Partners team to stay in touch with clients on a regular basis and keep the client focused on their business goals.
Ken has designed his meetings around the presentation format in Fathom’s Analysis Tools; the team can simply log in and project Fathom directly onto the wall during a meeting. The various visualisations in Fathom then help to guide and facilitate the conversation with the client.
Ken’s team walk the client through KPIs, profitability, cash flow, trends, goals, and any of Fathom’s other analysis tools that they feel are important. The client is able to ask questions and discuss the presentation, and Ken’s team takes notes on the discussion and records insights and action items. These are then sent to the client after the meeting.
Many business owners feel distracted by the volume of emails, messages, and requests they receive every day. There’s been a major effort by service companies to back off from in-person meetings and lengthy emails and instead provide business owners with digestible content they can look at when it’s convenient.
The problem is that many people simply don’t find the time – and when they’re missing out on something as important as financial insights, it can hurt their business.
An in-person meeting forces the business owner to sit down and work on the business and gives them a forum to ask questions. Ken sees a vital need for this personal touch in the industries he serves, and judging by his success, he’s on to a good thing.
“At the first meeting with a new client, we get to the Cash Flow Tool, and the client has a real ‘A-ha!’ moment,” explains Ken. “They always say, "That’s where my cash went!"
For Ken, advisory meetings have been a primary tool in growing valuable recurring revenue for his firm. His clients love the visibility they get from the visual presentation of their business numbers, as well as the chance to discuss the results, create action items, and ask questions.
An advisory meeting is a great way to help your clients unlock insights about the financial health and performance of their business.
Fathom is a cloud-based financial intelligence and management reporting app trusted by more than 50,000 companies worldwide.
