MAP is a forward-thinking accountancy firm in Manchester. Most of its clients run lifestyle businesses, which means their business and their personal are fundamentally linked. 

Experienced finance partners manage a portfolio of clients, working closely with owners and directors to deliver insightful financial information to help them make more informed decisions and drive change in their business.

“As an accountancy firm, you want to put your clients at the heart of how you operate. This means understanding them as individuals and as business owners, not just understanding the business."

Despite this, MAP founder Paul Barnes identified an insight gap in their understanding of their clients’ personal circumstances and how their goals, challenges and concerns informed what clients wanted from their businesses, and how MAP could best advise clients as a result.

"We wanted to understand what that actually meant practically and how you could deal with that issue. Around the same time, we had actually lost a client, quite a big client because they went to a firm that had financial planning under one roof. 

I felt a bit lost with it. I didn't know whether that's something we should be looking to do as a firm, or whether we should be looking to form some form of joint venture or just a referral system to refer to other financial advisers."

Paul says MAP needed tools to structure insight gathering on clients, and then access to professionals that could support clients with their personal financial needs. At the same time it was important that clients didn’t feel they were suddenly being railroaded into using a financial planner because MAP was going to get a slice of the action.

“It was about how we can help to better understand our clients so that we can better service them and that may involve them speaking to a financial partner, and it may not.

We wanted to make sure that we were covering that part of the venn diagram, if you like, between accountant and financial adviser. Understanding our clients from a personal perspective, without necessarily starting them on the journey of having to get the head around working with a financial adviser. We felt that as their accountant, we were really well-placed to do that, but we needed the tools to be able to do it.”

As part of an early adopters programme, Paul and his team were introduced to RQ. Over several months, MAP trialled and implemented RQ, providing regular feedback and product ideas throughout.

Ultimately, MAP adopted RQ to plug the gap in its client data, providing the tools to gather insights on clients systematically as well as allowing MAP to refer them to financial planners and advisers seamlessly when in the clients’ best interest.

“What attracted us to RQ was the ability to have a shared CRM between accountant and financial planner, so that we can track a client's journey throughout the referral, swapping notes, and making sure we’re on the same page for an existing client.

It was also the fact that with RQ, we finally had the tools to unlock that stage before that, before they are a client of the financial adviser or planner. We could start that process of understanding their hopes and dreams and their current personal financial situation and life situation. 

RQ’s Compass helps us to achieve that, whilst the shared CRM with partners helps us collaborate better and therefore support our clients at a very personal level.”

Rolling out Compass with clients

MAP began by hand-selecting clients they believed RQ’s diagnostic tool would suit. These clients already had strong relationships with the MAP team so it felt easier to ask them quite personal and sensitive questions.

“We pushed that out to those clients and explained to them our reasons for doing it; we had a reasonable take up.

Like anything, it's probably going to take several times to ask somebody and maybe pick up on their signals and prompt them at the right time.”

MAP is now starting to feed RQ into their wider content and communications, and will incorporate it into their onboarding process later this year.

“We've evolved now from the targeted aspect, which is still happening, but also we’re documenting it in our newsletters, website presentations, talks, etc.”

RQ’s compliance guardrails are a big bonus

Whilst MAP’s original intention was to use RQ to improve its understanding of clients and streamline referrals to financial advisers, Paul says that after getting up and running RQ’s in-built compliance functionality has been a big plus.

“We recognised when we looked at RQ that we had a slight blindspot as a business on the compliance side of professional introductions: what legislation says and the disclaimers that you need to make.

RQ helps us do the things that we had tried to DIY in Asana, such as consent gathering from clients on referrals, whilst also giving the added benefit of the compliance functionality built into the referral engine.”

RQ and Compass have had a significant impact, providing MAP’s team with the tools to have more meaningful conversations with clients and aligning their business goals with their personal needs. It has helped clients make better decisions and perceive the value provided by MAP more quickly than before.

The impact on clients and their relationship with MAP

Paul says RQ’s impact on clients and their relationship with MAP has been very positive.

“Our finance partners have always had a lot of care for our clients, but they needed the tools to support them and make it more practical, providing questions that can help them add value.

It's forced us to think about the answers to questions that are being asked, and ask ourselves: what can we do now, based on this, to add some value?”

Paul says he firmly believes that when you ask a client to provide information, you're extracting rather than giving to the ‘goodwill bank’.

"Clients are the ones making the effort, putting this information down. It’s MAP’s job to make this as effortless as possible and as valuable as possible for clients.

Some clients get it straight away and they get value by being asked clever questions and having to come up with the answers. They find that rewarding because it provides a bit more clarity. Other clients think they're of the mindset, I've done this for you. We need to turn that table and use their answers to give them value.”

RQ has plugged that gap, providing a way for Paul’s team to deliver value to clients faster.

Getting clients to value faster

Paul says the typical onboarding process to an accountancy firm is pretty dull for a business owner, since much of it involves tedious tasks such as providing access to accounting software, bringing the books up to date, finding issues with the data, setting us up as agents on the HMRC website and handling the last accountant’s work. 

“There's a bit of a dull period after that honeymoon of sign-up and all the excitement. It sort of tails off a little bit.”

With RQ's Compass, Paul says MAP can shorten clients’ time to value, giving them insights immediately.

“It's about proving our claim. As advisory accountants, our claim is about understanding clients as business owners, helping them to get what they want out of the business.

Now we’re able to back it up, by asking intelligent questions, and giving them immediate value before we've got into the mechanics of the business. 

All that boring stuff has to happen. But we've got a team of people in the back end to deal with all of that. Whereas the relationship owner, the finance partner, their job is to work on the perceived value for the client rather than necessarily actual value. 

We could do some really important stuff for them behind the scenes, but it doesn't mean a lot to them in the first instance, and some of it is negative as well, sometimes explaining, actually, your accounts have been found with errors or your balance sheet is not as good as you thought it would be. 

So whilst all that is happening, we can have some really positive conversations with the business owner themselves and get them excited about how they're going to improve their life through their business as well. So that's what I'm excited about with Compass and RQ.  

We've discussed internally the idea of Compass being embedded in our self-assessment process, because then you're saying, ‘Tax season is over. You know what you need to pay. Let's start thinking about what you're getting from the business and how that fits into your bigger personal picture.’ So I hope that for a client, that's really eyebrow raising as this is more than a compliance function. This is a firm that really cares about me as an individual."

Helping a client make better decisions

Paul says he thinks that speaking to clients about their personal goals and challenges not only makes his team better accountants and improves trust, but fundamentally helps clients make better decisions in their personal life.

“It’s so valuable because Compass comes from their accountant who has nothing to gain from running through this process, helping them identify things they should do like protection policies, savings, etc.

We don't benefit from that. It feels more objective. These are people that have worked with us for many years, and thanks to this there's now more trust.

It's definitely resulted in clients either taking action, perhaps on something that they’ve put off or procrastinated, or realising there’s something that they should be doing that they hadn't previously realised.”

MAP has already embedded RQ and Compass into its offering, providing clients with invaluable personal insights and access to high-quality financial advisers when required.

When looking to the future, Paul sees his team making more tactical improvements as well as benefiting from future RQ product releases such as automated consent gathering.

Also vital is the data the team is now able to collect; data which will potentially provide MAP with critical management information on its clients and enable it to further develop its service and proposition.

“The data is going to become more interesting because it's the same consistent questions that we're asking. We’ll be able to see the similarities across our client base with the answers that they're giving. 

From a more macro perspective, we would like Compass to become a default part of our onboarding process, offering clients the chance to run through it and talk about their results with our team and helping them make sure they build the business around what matters to them personally.

Compass just makes perfect sense for helping us to diagnose and understand and document what those things are for each individual client during the onboarding process.”