Our Managing Director, Brent, recently spoke with an accountant who asked a completely reasonable question:
“Why can’t I strategically advise off the P&L?”
It’s fair.
It’s logical.
It’s how most accountants were trained.
But here’s the truth about relying on a client’s P&L to advise:
Trying to deliver meaningful strategic advice straight from a P&L is like trying to coach a football team by only looking at the scoreboard.
You see the outcome — not the decisions, behaviours, or momentum that created it.
A P&L tells you what happened.
Strategic advice uncovers why it happened — and what to do next.
Accountants live in a quantitative world, where numbers lead and context follows.
Strategic advisory flips that.
It requires a structured way to understand the story behind the numbers — because that’s where big insights actually live.
And that is the shift most firms haven’t made yet.
This article dives into the steps to build your first true strategic advisory offer — one that moves you from instinctive, numbers-only advice to intentional and structured strategic advice that doesn’t rely on experience alone to deliver well.
Here’s why numbers (only) limit you — and what you need instead…
**01. Numbers Alone Aren’t Enough
When you rely on the P&L alone, you’re forced to fill in the gaps using skills like:
- intuition
- experience
- pattern recognition
- assumptions based on familiar scenarios
Great if you’ve been an advisor for 20 years.
Impossible if you’re trying to build advisory capability across a whole team.
And that’s why so much “strategic advice” today is unstructured:
- ideas thrown into meetings
- reacting to pain points
- interpreting results on the fly
- giving gut-feel direction
Useful? Absolutely.
Scalable? No.
To do strategic advisory well — and confidently — you need to understand the qualitative aspects of the client and their business:
| Decisions: Not just what was chosen, but what led to those choices — the assumptions, pressures and thinking behind them. | |
| Direction: Where the owner is actually trying to go — not what the P&L implies, but what they genuinely want to achieve in their life — professionally and personally. | |
| Priorities: Where the owner invests time and energy, what gets avoided and why — and how that shapes business performance. | |
| Behaviours: The habits and patterns shaping performance long before they show up in the numbers. | |
| Bottlenecks: What’s affecting the ability to make things happen — the real constraints no report will ever show. | |
| Goals: The deeper motivations, aspirations and personal drivers influencing every decision. |
These are the qualitative layers behind every number — and they’re invisible in a report.
This is what transforms “advice” into true strategic advisory.
And this is where structure becomes essential…
**02. Structure Turns Insight into Confidence
Most accountants think strategic advice requires knowing everything before walking into the room.
You don’t.
You need a structure that leads the conversation for you.
When you use tools like:
- diagnostics
- assessments
- guided frameworks
…you create a process that uncovers the story behind the numbers without hours of prep or years of experience.
Structure shifts you from:
“I hope I say the right thing.” to→ “I know exactly how to guide this conversation.”
It keeps you in control.
It keeps the client focused.
It creates clarity, insight and momentum — every time.
This is how less experienced team members become capable advisors.
This is how firms build consistency.
This is how strategic advisory becomes deliverable.
Once you have structure, you don’t need a perfect offering to begin…
**03. Forget the Perfect Offer
Your first advisory offer shouldn’t be a masterpiece — it just needs to work.
You don’t need a 12-step model.
You need one defined session with one clear outcome.
Some sessions that could get the ball rolling could be:
A Strategic Clarity Session
A structured conversation that uses the numbers but digs beyond them — helping the owner understand which strategic direction is right for them.
A Business Health Review
A walkthrough of what’s working, what’s not, and which bottlenecks are slowing momentum — guided by a diagnostic or structured questions.
A 90-Day Planning Workshop
A short, focused session that helps the owner choose their top priorities and outline immediate next steps.
Each of these is simple, contained, and ready to deliver now.
Not perfect.
Not polished.
Not the final version.
Just the first intentional offering of the strategic advice you’ve already been doing informally for years.
**04. Price the Outcome — Not the Hours
Clear structure makes clear pricing possible.
If your offer is vague, your price will feel vague.
If your offer is clear, pricing becomes simple.
Clients don’t pay for time.
They pay for better outcomes for their business, less stress, and a plan that helps them sleep at night.
Value isn’t the minutes you spend — it’s the shift you create.
To price well, anchor your offer to:
- the problem you’re solving
- the outcome they walk away with
- the emotional + strategic value
- the decision or direction you help them clarify
That’s advisory pricing.
Intentional, not hourly.
**05. Stop Designing. Start Delivering.
You can’t learn strategic advisory from numbers alone — only from real conversations. One thing we know for sure: your strategic advisory offering will evolve — and it should.
But that evolution can’t begin while the offer is still sitting in a notebook, a Google Doc, or in your head. Advisory capability is built by delivering, then learning from what happens in the room.
Game-changer tips to continually strengthen your strategic advisory offering:
| Debrief every session: Capture what worked — and what didn’t. |
| Keep shaping your offer: Treat it as something alive — not something finished. |
| Get input from experts: It shortens the learning curve and builds confidence faster. |
| Ask clients how it felt: Their feedback shows you where your structure needs tightening. |
The Wrap-Up: Strategic Advice Starts Where the P&L Stops
Your advisory offering won’t come to life when it’s perfectly designed.
It comes to life the moment you stop relying solely on what the P&L can tell you —
and start exploring everything it can’t.
That’s the shift.
Strategic advisory begins where the numbers end: in the decisions, direction, priorities, behaviours, bottlenecks and goals that genuinely shape a business.
And you don’t uncover any of that by polishing a framework at your desk.
You uncover it in the conversation — by guiding it, questioning it, challenging it, and helping the owner see what they couldn’t see before.
That’s what makes strategic advice powerful.
Not knowing everything.
Not having a perfect process.
But being willing to deliver, review, refine — and keep going.
Because clients don’t need another report.
They need someone who can help them understand the story behind the numbers and what to do next.
And that starts with you.
Stop designing.
Start delivering.
That’s how real strategic advisory is built.
