Everyone's talking about advisory. Almost no one can tell you what it is.

By Brent Szalay FCPA
Founder & Strategic Advisory – Leaders in Business
Managing Director – SEIVA Advisory

When I came into this profession, everyone kept telling me the same thing: advisory is the future, you have to move into advisory, advisory is where the value is. But when I asked people to actually explain what advisory was — what it looked like on a Tuesday morning with a real client in front of you — nobody could give me a straight answer.

That bothered me. Because you can't build a business, or train a team, around a buzzword.

So let me start with the thing nobody gave me: a definition.

Strategic advisory is a structured way to guide business owners to clarity, focus and action.

That's it. Not a product. Not a package you bolt on at year-end. It's a repeatable way of helping a client see what's really going on in their business, work out what matters most, and turn that into decisions they actually make. Three words do the heavy lifting — structured, so it's a process and not a gifted conversation only the partner can have; clarity, because most owners are drowning in data and starved of insight; and action, because advice that doesn't change anything isn't advice, it's a nice chat.

Here's the distinction that matters. Advisory isn't setting up companies, giving CGT advice, running CFO meetings or producing management reports. All of that is valuable, and all of it is backward-looking — it reports the past. Advisory looks forward, it's built around the client's goals, and it looks at every part of their business, not just the numbers. Same client, different direction.

Why this matters now

If you've been in practice for any length of time, you've felt the ground shift. The work that used to pay the bills — the compliance, the returns, the reconciliations — is being automated and repriced down. It isn't going away, but it's becoming the floor, not the ceiling. You can't build a growing practice on work that gets cheaper every year.

The profession has actually been here before. We've moved through eras — from the ledger, to compliance, to spreadsheets, to the cloud — and every single time, technology automated the last job and pushed the practitioner up to something more valuable. Record-keeper became reporter became processor became real-time advisor. AI is simply the next wave, and it's doing the same thing:

taking the mechanical work, and freeing the human to do the thinking.

At the same time, clients have changed. They no longer want to know what happened last quarter; they expect to know what's happening right now, and they're asking questions the old model was never built to answer. Should I hire? Can I afford this? Where is my business actually heading? If we're not the ones answering those questions, someone else will be — a coach, a consultant, or the firm down the road.

So the case for advisory isn't really in dispute. What's missing, for most firms, isn't belief. It's a way in.

The four barriers — and why it's machinery, not motivation

Across the hundreds of practices we work with, the same four barriers come up again and again. And what's striking is that none of them are about wanting it. They're about not having the machinery to deliver it.

No delivery framework. Around 88% of firms tell us they don't have a clear, repeatable process to follow. So advisory lives in the directors' heads. It can't be trained and it can't be handed down — which means it can never scale beyond the two or three people who can already do it.

No packaging or pricing. About 85% find it hard to package and price advisory. They can do the work; they just can't put a number on it. And when you can't express the value, you give the advice away — buried in the compliance fee, or as a favour on the phone.

No tools. Roughly 83% don't have the right tools to systemise advisory, so every engagement starts from a blank page. Analysing a business properly by hand is exhausting, which means it either takes too long or doesn't get done well. This, incidentally, is exactly where AI earns its keep — collating data, spotting patterns, surfacing insight.

No confidence. This is the big one: 89% express a lack of confidence. Notice that's not a lack of capability. The technical skill is there. But the moment the conversation goes broader than the numbers, people are out of their comfort zone — because the facilitation skill hasn't been built yet.

Here's the through-line: framework, pricing, tools, confidence. Fix the machinery, and advisory stops being something only the directors can do. That's what makes it scalable. And confidence, notably, tends to grow the moment structure exists.

Advisory doesn't scale as a craft. It scales as a process.

The single biggest shift in my own thinking was this: for years we treated advisory as an art — a special conversation only the most experienced person in the firm could have. The firms that break through are the ones that turn it into a process the whole team can run.

That's what technology now makes possible. The manual work of analysing a business, running a strategy session and writing an action plan can be given structure and sequence — diagnostics that read the business, a repeatable session format, a clear plan the client can act on. And when the compliance grunt work is automated and the data is clean and real-time, this becomes possible for a firm of any size — not just the big ones with a dedicated advisory arm. Automation frees the capacity. Clean data feeds the process. Structure makes it repeatable.

Where do you actually start?

If all of that resonates but you're not sure where you sit — or where the gaps are — that's the honest starting point, and it's worth being deliberate about it rather than guessing.

We built the Leaders in Business Advisory Readiness Scorecard for exactly this moment. It's a short, structured diagnostic that scores your firm across the capabilities that actually determine whether advisory will scale — your delivery framework, your tools and structure, your team's capability, and your packaging and pricing. In a few minutes it gives you a clear read on where your firm stands today, and which barrier to address first.

It won't do the work for you. But it will tell you where the work is — and for most firms, simply seeing that clearly is the thing that turns “we should do more advisory” into a plan.

Want to know where your firms at?

If you've ever wondered where your own firm sits on that journey, we've created a short Advisory Readiness Quiz.

It takes just a few minutes to complete and will highlight your strengths, uncover the gaps and help you identify the next step towards building a more strategic advisory offering.

CA ANZ members get more, enrol with Leaders in Business and receive a 10% discount. CA ANZ discount code LIB10CA.

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