What we didn't see coming when we started doing advisory

I've been a lifelong woodworker. When I was ten, my father and grandfather introduced me to woodturning – bowls, baseball bats, stirrers, anything you could shape on a wood lathe.

More than half of what they taught me had nothing to do with the lathe. It was about the tools. Whether the chisel was sharp. How to work a stone – coarse first, then fine. How to dress the edge on a leather strop. Which mineral oil to use. How to temper a blade so the edge held. Without that discipline, I'd never have produced anything worth keeping. And the habit of preventive sharpening has carried across every other area of woodworking I've touched since – chainsaws, benchsaws, and everything in between.

This is the trap every woodworker eventually learns the hard way: you get so busy on the work in front of you that you stop maintaining the tools doing the work. The output still goes out. But the quality of what you produce, and the effort it takes to produce it, start drifting in opposite directions.

Last week I closed on the Six Laws by saying there are three ways I've watched this transition break down, over and over, with bookkeepers and fractional CFOs who have both the framework and the delivery right. When I sat down to name them, I realized I'd framed it wrong. They aren't three separate failures. They're three stages of the same trap.

One thing worth naming before I go into them: the journey into advisory always starts solo. You might be four people in a firm, or a team of twelve, but each advisor’s journey in is solo at the point of delivery until the firm has built a common system everyone works from. Even when the base starts common, it diverges the moment each person begins customizing for their clients. That solo starting condition is how the work begins, not a failure of the firm. Which is exactly why the trap is so universal.

When Kristina and I first moved into advisory, we built what we thought would help – pulled the data, analyzed it, gave clients a view of their business they didn't have before. They engaged. We took on more. Each conversation was slightly different, each client had slightly different preferences, and we adapted each time: another copy of the spreadsheet, another dashboard, each one bent a slightly different direction from the last.

We grew the business from there, one or two or four clients at a time. And the further we got, the more the mechanical work outweighed the reason we were in it – helping business owners add insight to their instinct, so they could build the life and outcomes they'd started the business for. In our quest to stop them slaving and struggling, we started slaving and struggling ourselves, for different reasons.

Spreadsheets rely on data sources that change. Formulas break when a client restructures their chart of accounts. Dashboards pull from integrations that get deprecated quietly in the background. Report formats diverge as you adapt each one for its client. The work that took an hour takes an hour and a half, then two, then three – and you can't point to what changed, because nothing dramatic did. The weight just accumulated.

You end up too busy swinging the axe to stop and sharpen it. The client work has to go out. The books have to close. The meetings happen on schedule. And whilst all of that keeps happening, the tooling is getting more brittle, the busy work around it is getting heavier, and the time you have for the thing you actually wanted to do – the interpretation, the judgment, the conversation – gets squeezed from both ends.

The way through is standardization – not of the output, which stays client-specific, but of the system underneath. Common data architecture, common report scaffolding, common ways of handling the transformations every client needs.

At our worst, we were running roughly three hours of mechanical work per client per week. Ten clients is thirty hours – gone before you've delivered a single insight, had a single conversation, added a dollar of value. When we rebuilt the plumbing, the same work took fifteen to twenty minutes per client. Ten clients became three and a half hours. Same deliverable, same revenue, and somewhere north of twenty-five hours a week returned to the part of the practice the client is actually paying for.

The advisory work on top of that got better, because we had the attention to spend on it.

Stage one feeds directly into stage two, and almost no one sees the connection at the time.

When the mechanical work is inflating – when what used to take an hour now takes three – and you're pricing on hours or on deliverables, the economics collapse quietly. You're charging the same amount for two or three times the input. The client's getting the same report they always got. You're absorbing all the drift.

The natural reaction is to raise the rate. It almost never works. You're still measuring the wrong thing – your input – and the client is left to decide whether your hours and your deliverables feel worth it. That's always a losing conversation for you, because no client thinks about their bookkeeper's hours the way their bookkeeper does.

A business coach I had years ago – Kirkland Tibbles – told me the measure of value is pain. If you're offering something of value and you step away, does that cause pain? That's the test. Not hours in. Not pages out. Not meetings held. The question is whether your absence would be felt, and how acutely.

Quantify the pain, and you can quantify the value of avoiding it. That's work you have to do yourself – not a conversation to have with the client. No one ever answers "yes, I'd pay a hundred thousand a year for that."

What you're building, over time, is a read on the outcomes you're producing – the decisions that moved because of the conversation, the hires that didn't happen, the cash crunches seen three months out instead of three days out. Some of that picture comes from clients telling you directly, some from testimonials and referrals, some from your own honest read of what the next best alternative would have cost them. It builds slowly. But once you have it, the price follows the value, not the hours.

Survive stages one and two, and you're in a better place. That's where the third stage quietly waits. It looks nothing like failure from the outside – right up until engagement flattens and you can't put your finger on why.

The shape is this. You've figured out the framework, the delivery, the pricing. The monthly report lands. The monthly conversation lands. Same structure, same format, same rhythm. Month in, month out.

At first the client engages. Then, six or eight months in, something quiet happens. The report becomes furniture. The client still gets it, still reads it, still shows up to the meeting. But it's stopped feeling like insight. It's just what the bookkeeper sends now. The framework you built to reach them has become the ceiling of the relationship.

What's going on is human. Familiarity builds a bond over time – the client trusts you, the rhythm is comfortable, and the relationship starts carrying weight the work no longer has to earn. That bond is real and it's valuable. It's also how you drift without noticing.

Kristina and I decided early that we wouldn't sit in that space. Not for the client's sake – for ours. My personal reputation, and hers, and what we hold ourselves to, comes before anything else in the practice. The company's reputation is an extension of that, not something we lean on to carry us through a rough patch.

So we built a practice of ninety-day introspection. Every quarter, across every client, we ask a version of the same question: strip out the relationship history — would today's work stand on its own as adding real value? If the honest answer is anything less than yes, something has to change — not just in the deliverable, but in what we're actually bringing to the relationship.

The core deliverable itself is the anchor, not the product. It's the base point clients come back to, because consistency and continuity matter to them.

Fair warning: this one tastes horrible. Something between moonshine and Samagon if you ever came across it – raw, medicinal, the kind of taste that makes you check the label. Non-alcoholic, for the record. It just drinks like something that shouldn't be legal.

I take a shot each morning alongside the green juice Kristina and I squeeze ourselves, and it makes a measurable difference in acuity and focus. Not a vague caffeine-adjacent lift – a sustained sharpness in the kind of work that matters for this newsletter. Holding the thread across a long client conversation. Writing something that needs three ideas in the air simultaneously. Reading a P&L and actually seeing what's moved, rather than scanning it.

On the mornings I take it, my thinking is clearer. On the mornings I skip it, it isn't.

It belongs in this issue because showing up well in advisory conversations is physical work. Sleep matters. Stress load matters. What goes into your body in the first hour of the day matters, probably more than most of us care to admit.

No referral code on this one. I just take it and it works.

Stage one of the trap comes down to capacity – the hours the mechanical work has quietly consumed before you've delivered a single insight. Next week I want to walk through what Kristina and I actually did to get those hours back. Not the abstract version. The month-by-month work of finding where the time was going, deciding what to automate first, and rebuilding the plumbing underneath so the advisory work on top could finally get the attention it deserved.

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