By Joseph Graziano, CFP®.

As an accounting firm, you know what to offer correct tax preparation can cause significant fluctuations in your cash flow and workload. You’ll be extremely busy one month, and twiddling your thumbs the next month trying to stay busy.

Providing financial services to clients is a wise business decision.

After all, financial planning and tax planning complement each other very well. In fact, more 75% of Americans don’t use a financial planner. The market is huge and there is a gap to be filled if you know how to offer financial services to your clients.

You to want to provide the best service to your customers. When you provide financial services, you increase the value you deliver while improving your bottom line. It’s a win-win for all parties involved.

Expansion in financial services allows your business to become a one stop shop for clients and can increase your average revenue per client. However, it can seem like a daunting task if you don’t know how to start offering financial services.

Fortunately, this is not mandatory.

Benefits of providing financial services to clients

If your business is doing well, you may be wondering: why should i expand my services? While the concept may seem intimidating to some, there are a number of benefits that can help your business grow, including:

• Improve revenue per customer. The same clients that you have at present need financial services to some extent. You can leverage these existing relationships to improve your revenue per customer.
• Stable annual turnover. Tax season is a holiday or famine for many accounting firms, and even if you feast for weeks on end, the job eventually dries up. Expansion in different departments will help you generate stable and more reliable annual income.
• Create a competitive advantage. You may be the best tax service in the world, but your clients want convenience. When you offer everything under one roof, you gain a competitive advantage because you meet all of your customers’ needs.
• Accelerate Customer Success. Financial planning, which includes retirement and investment planning, helps you accelerate your clients’ success while putting more money into your business.
• Attract new customers. Calling on a larger customer base is good for business. When you start offering these additional services, you will attract new customers who will help your business grow. If you live in a city or a smaller part of the country, adding new services may be the only way to attract many new customers.

Whenever you can create value for your customers, you increase customer loyalty and your own profits.

Confused about where to start offering financial services? There are many different ways to grow in financial services, but the three that really stand out from the crowd are listed below.

3 Ways to Start Providing Financial Services to Your Customers

1. Become a freelance financial planner

First, you can decide to become a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) and start providing services to your clients. However, this is an intensive option as you will also have to go through all the educational requirements.

The main advantages of this method are:

• Reap 100% of the financial benefits
• Complete freedom to help your own customers
• More control over the services you offer

However, you should also consider the disadvantages:

• You will be responsible for additional work
• Certification is a long and tedious task

Of course, you don’t have to tackle becoming CFP® on your own. Instead, you can work with professionals who will help you develop your new services and can even help you with the educational parts of the certification.

If there’s one great thing about the financial planning industry, it’s that help is always around the corner.

2. Offer financial planning on a case-by-case basis

Maybe you not want to get into insurance services or your clients’ mortgage needs – it’s up to you. Instead, one of the ways to offer financial services is to do it on a case-by-case basis.

That way, when a customer requests a service you love, you can do it in-house.

And for those additional services, such as insurance, you can outsource this service to a third party. When you choose the option on a case-by-case basis, you benefit from it in several ways, you:

• Choose your areas of intervention
• Make more money with “outsourcing services”
• Offer a more robust service to your customers

3. Use a unique approach, like the PASS system

If you don’t have the time or resources to offer in-house financial planning, you can work with a dedicated team that will work with your clients. At FFP, we offer the PASS system, which allows you to:

• Stay involved in services
• Lighten resources
• Always stay in the loop

When working with a single system, such as PASS, you are working with a member of a financial planning team who consults with clients and helps them achieve their goals, but you will still be involved throughout the process.

Adding financial planning to your business offering can help stabilize your business’ income, improve customer retention, and increase satisfaction. Using any of the above approaches will allow you to continue to grow your business in a way that is sustainable for you, while still providing customers with the services they want.

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Joseph Graziano, CFP® is vice-president and partner in wealth management at FFP Wealth Management. Through the management of FFP, Joe and his team help manage over $ 2.4 billion in assets. FFP Wealth Management has served the unique needs of the accounting community for over 28 years and was formed as a result of the urgent need for accountants and financial planners to join forces to provide high-end services to their clients. If you have any questions about adding financial planning services to your business, you can contact Joe here.