For CPAs and tax professionals, meeting quarterly with business owner clients is critical for success. Find out how business valuation can create a repeatable framework for engaging clients and providing meaningful advice.

For small business owners, meeting regularly with their accountant can be critical to the business’s success, especially if they’re receiving more than tax preparation services.

And for accountants serving those small business owners, demand is high for the kind of concierge attention that goes beyond basic tax preparation. A recent Thomson Reuters’ report indicates that 95% of tax professionals believe their clients want business advisory services, a sentiment echoed by another study reporting that only 61% of business owners are satisfied with the services their accountants offer them.

Providing these in-demand advisory offerings has the power to significantly increase revenue for CPAs and tax professionals (by about five times), but delivering consistently valuable business advice throughout the year can be a challenge.

This is especially true for CPAs and tax professionals meeting quarterly with their business owner clients. Offering business valuation can provide both an engaging and repeatable framework for meetings, as well as open the door for conversations around other available services, such as strategizing on tax efficiency, lowering the cost of overhead, and planning for retirement.

Here are five ways you can use business valuation to guide your quarterly meeting structure and deliver the advice business owners are looking for:

  1. Check in on the business’s overall health and growth trajectory: Performing business valuations at a regular cadence helps business owners understand how their companies are growing, and at what velocity.
     
    It’s up to you how often you run business valuations for your clients, but we suggest at least twice a year to monitor growth, catch any potential downturns in value, and keep business performance on track.

  2. Uncover areas for improvement: Monitoring trends in the business’s overall value is important, but so is keeping track of the individual levers that make up that value and impact operational health, like return on equity, inventory turnover, income-to-revenue and cash flow ratio.

    To help you do this more easily, BizEquity’s valuation report includes 12 critical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) benchmarked against industry standards, so you can show your clients exactly where they’re underperforming against or outperforming their competitors. 

  3. Evaluate the effects of changes to the business. As you continue to provide business advisory services to your clients, you’ll learn more about the business itself – and your quarterly meetings are a great opportunity to discuss adjustments your clients have made during the quarter.

    Things like new hires, additional product or service offerings, change in process or procurement workflows, and even seasonality can impact a business’s value. Discussing these changes with your client in the context of an up-to-date business valuation helps them understand whether they need to make further adjustments.

  4. Address changing tax regulations: For small business owners, understanding tax regulations can feel overwhelming – especially since they are in a constant state of flux. This is your time to shine.

    As new tax obligations take effect, use your quarterly meetings to break down what your clients need to know, and show them where they might see their business’s value impacted.

  5. Check in with your clients’ long-term goals. As business owners near retirement, having both a historical and up-to-date understanding of the business’s value can guide succession or exit planning decisions. Especially if they are thinking about selling their business, knowing that well in advance gives you time to begin preparing for the tax implications of the sale based on the business’s value.

    Even if you don’t already provide business valuation as a service, using BizEquity’s software offers a low barrier to entry for tax professionals, since the valuations can be run using information you already collect from your business owner clients. And while traditionally, valuations could take between 6-8 weeks, BizEquity allows you to run a valuation in less than 30 minutes, making it easy to prepare for client meetings. 

Finally, the report itself acts as a powerful engagement tool, showing four estimates of value, a valuation history graph to illustrate changes in value over time, and 12 important performance metrics. 


To learn more about using BizEquity to inspire more engaging quarterly meetings, click here.