Real Insights from HoganTaylor’s 5-Office Onsite
Bringing together Hogan Taylors CAAS (Client Accounting & Advisory Services) team from five different offices for a one-day intensive advisory workshop was an incredible experience for Infinite Ties. When you get sharp accounting professionals together to focus on the shift from traditional compliance to true strategic advisory, the insights come fast, and so do the honest conversations about what holds teams back.
Here is a look at what we uncovered, what advisory really means to the HoganTaylor team, and the immediate steps they are taking to build momentum.
The Reality Check: What Holds Teams Back from Moving to the second A in CAAS, the Advisory!
Making the leap from Accounting to Advisory services isn’t just a switch you flip, it requires intentional changes in workflow, communication, and boundaries. The team laid out their top friction points:
- Capacity & Bottlenecks: Getting caught in the month-end close bottleneck leaves little breathing room for proactive advisory work.
- Client & Internal Alignment: Managing change for clients, setting firm boundaries, and educating internal partners on what Advisory actually includes.
- Knowledge Sharing & Tools: Lacking a centralized template repository, needing better cross-office communication, facing cash flow tool limitations.
- Hands-on Exposure: The need for team members to “ride along” on more CFO and Controller calls to see advisory in action.
Redefining Advisory: Beyond the Numbers
When we asked the HoganTaylor team what Advisory means to them, the conversation quickly shifted away from balance sheets and toward human connection. To them, advisory is:
“Relationship building, trust, being the client’s first phone call, acting as a soundboard (and sometimes a therapist), education, and financial interpretation.”
Advisory isn’t just delivering a report, it’s interpreting what the numbers mean for the human being running the business and earning the trust to be their go-to advisor.
Core Takeaways: Shifting the Focus Forward
During our training sessions, several core themes emerged on how to practically deliver on that definition of advisory:
- The 70/30 Rule: Spend only 30% of client meeting time discussing past and present results, and reserve 70% for future strategy, forecasting, and scenario planning.
- Business Storytelling: Run financial scenarios that clearly map out the impact on the bottom line.
- Proactive Curiosity: Stay up to date on market news, stay curious about patterns in everyday transaction data, and adopt a “see something, say something” mindset for the transactional team closest to the daily data.
- Stronger Client Connections: Focus on ideal, approachable clients, reach out proactively to accounts where you don’t yet provide advisory services, and maintain consistent continuity across teams.
The Immediate Action Plan
To close out the day, we asked the team: Which of these takeaways can you commit to starting immediately? Two clear winners took center stage:
- Centralized Client Conversation Files (Number 1 Choice): Creating a shared, accessible file for all client conversations and notes so the entire engagement team has full visibility and context.
- Quarterly Engagement Team Meetings (Close Second): Establishing a consistent cadence of internal team check-ins per engagement to align on client goals before meeting with the client.
Grateful for the Journey
We at Infinite Ties greatly appreciated the opportunity to spend time with this talented team, and we are most grateful that Aaron Ackerman has shared feedback with us that his team continues to come to him with new ideas sparked by the session on how they can be advisory.
That kind of self-driven momentum is proof that the shift is already happening—the HoganTaylor team isn’t just waiting for direction, they are actively taking ownership and driving the future of advisory themselves.
