This is an intro to Transform: Making the Switch from Compliance to Advisory Services

1. Transform
Making the Switch from Compliance to Advisory

2. Confidential Customized for Malartu, Inc. Version 1.0
TOC
Benefits
Pre-Positioned to Offer
Advisory Services
Becoming a
Linchpin
What will it look
like?
Gathering Data
Embedding in
Teams
Clearly Defining
Projects
Becoming a
Collaborator
Pricing for
Value
Managing
Progress
Publishing Success

3. Benefits to Advisory Work
1 Increased Margins 2 Low-hanging Fruit 3 Future-Proof Work

4. Increased Margins
A healthy consulting business should
have around 50% gross margins and
about 30% margin for admin/SG&A,
making for about 20% in EBIT.

5. Increased Margins
You already have a base of clients paying
you for compliance services. The cost to
convert clients to advisory services will
be significantly lower than your average
management consulting CAC.

6. Pre-Positioned
To do this work
“A consultant as someone who has a unique set of
skills and talents that help to create the value-adding
components that their client’s businesses lack.”
- Alan Weiss, Million Dollar Consulting
Two Sources of Expertise:
1. Content Expertise: Professional comfort
zone
2. Process Expertise: Framework for solving
issues

7. Content Expertise
● You have years of experience in accounting and finance, you’ve
seen it before
● You have access to 10’s if not 100’s of large financial data sets

8. Process Expertise
● Framework for materializing a mission and vision
● Framework for running meetings
● Content expertise for solving issues

9. Future-Proofing
Your Firm

10. Becoming a Linchpin
“Become so valuable to your client that
you can never be replaced.”
- Seth Godin, Linchpin

11. Compliance Work
For Client Acquisition
Compliance Work:
● Fulfills Need
● Transactional
● Convenient
Advisory Work:
● Fulfills Need
● Value-Added Work
● Trusted
● Non-automated

12. The Vision:
Advisory
Projects

13. Everyone has a Goal
● Professional goals
● Personal goals
Your job is to identify personal and professional goals through early compliance engagements
and position yourself to help the client reach them.

14. Advisory Phases
1 Contracting 2 Discovery 3 Solutions

15. Contracting Phase
Establish scope and general expectations
for meeting a goal. Set project
boundaries in order to manage
expectations in the future.

16. Discovery Phase
Conduct a thorough analysis of the
business, uncovering all necessary data
points for understanding the ins and outs
of what makes the business tick.

17. Solutions Phase
Develop initiatives for reaching key
objectives and schedule feedback
sessions to alleviate doubts and plan next
steps. Educate employees on impact of
the solution and how it makes life better.

18. Execution:
Gathering Data

19. Top, Down & Out Data Discovery
1 Market Trends 2 Internal Trends 3 Forecasting

20. Market trends
What’s around?
Based on your content expertise, what’s going on in this
particular customer niche? Are they facing challenges in
automation? Any new technologies that can alleviate their
issues?.
Leaning on niche expertise
Maybe you have a high number of construction clients - what
are they saying? How can you use your content expertise to
generate unique market predictions?

21. Internal Data
What’s happening?
Collect current and historical financial, sales, and operations data:
● Calculate industry-specific KPIs
● How are we trending?
● Immediate issues?
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
0
20
40
60
80
100
Trend 01 Trend 02

22. Forecasting
What will happen?
Forecast key metrics and financials to understand:
● What happens if things go unchanged?
● What happens if we change certain scenarios?
● Where could we be by hiring out advisory services?
Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec future future future future future
0
20
40
60
80
100
Trend 01 Trend 02

23. Embedding in
Teams

24. Embedding in Teams
Consulting is as much about
understanding the interpersonal
dynamics of a team as it is technical
expertise.

25. Embedding in Teams
Build “roaming time” into projects where
you get an overview of how the
organization works and is perceived by
different stakeholders.

26. Defining Projects
and Managing
Progress

27. Managing Progress Toward Goals
When engaging with a client you must
stay aligned on the “what,” not the
“how.” Focus on the end result to keep
the bigger picture in sight: their goals.

28. Use Clearly Defined
Objectives
Use a management framework like EOS to run all of your
advisory projects. Your framework should be able to
clearly tie every task and objective back to a personal or
professional goal of your client.
01 | 10 year picture
02 | 3 year picture
03 | 1 year plan
04 | Quarterly objectives

29. Becoming a
Collaborator

30. Three Types of Consultants
1 Interventionist: imbues effective skills
2 Expert: resolves issues
3 Collaborator: imbues skills, resolves issues, prepares team for future
The best consultants collaborate with their clients. After all, consulting is about resolving issues and transferring skills to
clients to avoid issues in the future. Alan Weiss (author of Million Dollar Consulting) names three types of consultants:

31. Managing Resistance
If you are asked the same question twice,
no problem. Explain the concept better.
Asked that same question three times?
This is a sign of resistance...

32. How Collaborators Manage Resistance
● Discuss resistance with neutral language
● Use phrases like, “I'm sensing that you doubt my judgement. Do you have a feeling that my
research wasn’t thorough enough?”
“Emotional Intelligence” by Tony Hsieh is a favorite book of mine for identifying and managing
resistance to consulting, but in general, this will come down to developing communication skills.

33. Pricing for Value
not Time

34. Value-Based
Pricing
● Advisory services are all about value-based pricing. Whether you like
it or not, your time is not inherently worth anything.
● Helping your client reach their strategic goal is inherently worth
something. Advisory services should be priced based on reaching
goals. Again, it’s about the “what” not the “how.”
● Price for a 10-20X ROI after you have pegged the value of reaching a
goal.
Value of Project
$300K
Goal for profitability
improvement is $100,000
annually over the next 2-3
years
ROI Goal
10X
Shooting for a 10:1 ROI
Pricing
$30K
Bill monthly, for completion of
project, etc. Regardless of
time it takes to complete.

35. Managing Progress in Monthly Meetings
Scorecard Reviews
Scorecards feature the hard data behind
strategic initiatives. These reviews will
measure the incremental tasks behind
reaching objectives.
Quarterly Objective Reviews
Regularly checking in to make sure that tasks
done by key team members are actually
contributing to quarterly objectives is key.
Address and Solve Issues
Reviewing both the scorecard and quarterly
objectives will uncover issues that need
addressing. It’s important to discuss and solve
these before they become major problems.

36. Running Effective Meetings
Create an atmosphere for open communication,
especially as it pertains to identifying and solving
issues. If you don’t, you will burden yourself with a
heavy load of writing reports and run meetings
devoid of goals.

37. Growing
Through
Published
Success

38. Growing through Published Success
Once you have built your playbook for
executing the mission in a niche market:
Give it away.

39. Helpful Content
Is the cornerstone to an
inbound strategy
Not only does publishing your playbook frame you as the
expert and best possible person to solve a problem, it will get
people talking, spreading your reputation and your brand,
and grow your pipeline far more than limiting those
conversations to paying customers.

40. What Now?

41. Enroll in Transform: from Compliance to
Advisory
1
A copy of the full Advisory Management Framework by Malartu
2 $150 credit to Malartu
3
30 minute Q&A with Malartu Partner Advisor after completing course
Our full course includes:
4 Access to Private Facebook Group exclusive to Malartu Partners
5
Copy of the full “Transform: Making the Transition to Advisory Services” eBook

42. See you there 👋