Advisory Training Starts with “Want It"

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Recently, in The Kick C@$ Community Roundtable, a question came up about how to train current staff on advisory so the owner can get out of the work and the firm can actually scale it. The question itself wasn’t surprising, but it did surface an assumption I’ve seen cause problems before.

CAS breaks down quickly when we assume our team wants work they never signed up for.

I learned this lesson the hard way while building a real-time bookkeeping offering in an accounting firm. I’d come back from conferences excited about new technology and try to force it onto my team. In hindsight, they didn’t want it. They were comfortable with how things worked, didn’t want to change, and that disconnect eventually cost me good people. That experience taught me a hard truth: your vision is not automatically your team’s vision.

Because of that, the first place I’d start isn’t training, it’s evaluation. Specifically, using the EOS concept of Get It, Want It, and Capacity to Do It.

Before you invest time, money, and energy into advisory training, you need to be honest about whether your current team actually checks those boxes. Advisory doesn’t fail because people aren’t smart enough. It fails because we assume motivation and capacity that aren’t there.

Even when someone clearly gets advisory and genuinely wants it, there’s another reality to account for. My mentor, Greg Crabtree, has repeatedly seen that many people struggle to clearly communicate financials and financial strategy in a way that clients actually understand. Because of that, he vets new hires heavily upfront. If someone can’t naturally explain financial insights simply, he moves on rather than spending months trying to coach it. Interestingly, he’s found that people with non-accounting business degrees often perform better in this area.

And even when you find people who can communicate well, advisory introduces structural challenges. Strong advisors are expensive, and consistently filling their plates with advisory clients is neither easy nor predictable.

That’s why a line from rereading The E-Myth has stuck with me recently:
“Build your business around ordinary people, not extraordinary people.”

That idea pushed me toward building more repeatable service lines, like bookkeeping, which are far easier to scale than advisory teams built around unicorn talent.

That said, if I were going to expand advisory today, I’d approach it in two practical ways.

First, I’d start internally with anyone on the team who wants advisory. I wouldn’t put them in front of clients right away. Instead, I’d have them record short Loom videos highlighting two to five things that stood out in a client’s financials and what the client could potentially do about them in the future. This lowers the pressure, forces clearer thinking, and gives leadership something concrete to coach against.

Second, I’d look outside the firm for semi-retired CFOs who want to work a few hours a week. One of the best ways to find these people is through other professional service providers, such as lawyers, bankers, and wealth advisors. This approach has worked well for me multiple times and for other accounting firms I know.

The takeaway is simple: advisory isn’t a training problem; it’s a people-and-capacity problem. Start by honestly evaluating whether your team gets it, wants it, and has the capacity to do it. From there, build a model that doesn’t rely on extraordinary humans to make your firm work.

Thanks for reading, Luke Templin!

P.S. There are four ways I can help you grow your CAS offerings when you are ready:

1. Join my How to Start Offering Advisory Services Cohort.

2. Cannot wait until it starts? Check out the pre-recorded version here.

3. Join The Kick C@$ Community to grow your CAS offering alongside others doing the same.

4. Automated white-labeled financial digests for your clients with FinDaily.io