There’s a good reason client advisory services (CAS) practices have been the talk of the profession over the past few years: The service line has fueled massive growth for firms. For example, of the top 100 firms reporting practice area growth, more of them point to CAS as the source of growth than any other practice area. And it’s not just large firms that are benefiting—firms of all sizes have successfully launched and grown CAS practices that are suited to their size and ambitions.
How will firms sustain CAS growth over the long term?
Sheer volume is one way to do it: Just keep adding clients at a steady pace, relying on smart technology investments to meet their needs as efficiently as possible. Another approach is to “land and expand”—build on successful, limited engagements with clients by providing them with more services over time. These are both proven ways to grow in CAS, but even they have their limits. There are ultimately only so many clients to serve, and only so many services to offer them.
One of the most successful ways to keep your CAS practice growing is to focus on delivering advisory-level business insights to clients. Insight-based engagements are more valuable to clients than transactional and controller-level services (which we refer to as financial CAS), they lead to deeper long-term client relationships, and they often are suited for recurring revenue models.
New growth requires new focus
Many firms aren’t built to deliver advisory-level insights today, and neither are their CAS practices. Rob Henderson leads a successful CAS practice at Windes, a Top 100 firm based in southern California. Years ago, he asked his peers in the firm’s bookkeeping practice for help in providing exit planning services to his clients. “I quickly found out that the business insights piece was lacking from our practice,” Rob said. That’s when he decided to build this capacity within the CAS practice to ensure growth and to meet the needs of the firm’s clients.
Retooling (or starting) your firm’s CAS practice to deliver advisory-level, strategic insights to clients is called business insights CAS and requires engaging many different aspects of the practice. Staffing. Technology. Packaging and pricing the services. Marketing. Sales. And more. It’s a journey that must always start with a clear vision, guiding key decisions in each of these areas.
What services should your CAS practice provide to meet clients’ needs for insights? Will the practice focus on specific industries? How does your vision for business insights CAS match up with your firm’s overarching strategy, strengths, values and identity? Which members of the CAS team and the broader firm should shape the vision, and who has responsibility for realizing it over the long term? These are the types of questions that the visioning process should answer, resulting in a vision statement that is clearly stated, easy to understand, and succinctly conveys your goals as a practice.
It helps to have an experienced guide for the journey
Establishing a vision for your CAS practice that is focused on business insights can be tough, especially for firms that have traditionally focused elsewhere. Many firms find it helpful to work with an external coach or consultant who brings deep, hands-on experience with business insights CAS, knows how to develop a successful vision drawing from the insights of firm leaders, and can offer an objective perspective.
At Windes, Rob chose to work with CAS experts from CPA.com once he realized that establishing a successful vision for business insights CAS would require much more than simply adopting the right technology. Working with CPA.com through participation in a CAS 2.0® Practice Development Consulting engagement, he and his team embarked on a transformational journey that touched on everything from talent and technology to pricing, packaging and beyond. The result? “Things really started to take off,” says Rob. “We started working with more clients and increasing our revenue. We’ve really built the foundation we need to grow this practice exponentially, and our goals today look very different than they did two years ago when we started this journey.”
If your firm has experience delivering business insights and is confident in its ability to develop a clear vision for business insights CAS, great. But if you could use some help at any step of the journey, CPA.com can help. Start by reviewing our top three CAS resources:
- Read “The Future of Client Advisory Services: Understanding CPA.com's CAS 2.0® framework“ white paper
- Learn more about CPA.com CAS 2.0 Coaching Program
About the author:
Kimberly K. Blascoe, CPA, leads CPA.com’s CAS 2.0 practice transformation programs, focusing on helping firms establish and grow optimized CAS practices through consulting, practice development and training offerings. Prior to joining CPA.com, Kim spent more than 30 years in public accounting, which included leading the CAS practice for a Top 20 firm.
