Advisory Conversations with Tim Seymour and Deb Halliday

You want to offer advisory to more clients, but you're already stretched to capacity. So how do you grow something new when everything still depends on you?

In this episode of Advisory Conversations, Tim and Deb explore why so many accounting and bookkeeping practice owners get stuck in this cycle. Compliance deadlines keep coming, clients want to speak directly to the owner, and even when work is delegated, the decisions and questions still find their way back to the same person.

They discuss the difference between delegating tasks and empowering your team to take ownership, why advisory requires different skills from compliance, and how proper preparation can turn reactive client meetings into valuable strategy sessions.

Tim and Deb also share how they're helping practice owners and their teams make progress through small, practical actions that build confidence, develop new skills and gradually embed advisory into the practice.

Because growing advisory isn't about squeezing more into an already full diary. It's about building a team that can deliver more value without everything resting on your shoulders.

What happens when an accountant’s desire to help people becomes the driving force behind their entire career?

In this episode of Advisory Conversations, Tim and Deb are joined by James Twigger, a chartered accountant, business coach and fractional CFO, to explore his journey from audit and practice ownership into a much more advisory-led role.

James shares how community initiatives like Torbay Hour and his daily COVID webinars helped him build relationships and grow his practice, without setting out to “market” his services. He also talks openly about the downside of always wanting to help, taking on too much, becoming the person everyone wanted to speak to, and eventually experiencing burnout.

The conversation then moves into James’s fractional CFO work, where he is helping businesses navigate growth, cash flow and strategic decisions, while his own team runs the day-to-day accountancy practice without him needing to be there all the time.

Along the way, we explore what advisory really looks like in practice, why regular conversations with clients matter, and how accountants can help business owners move from simply surviving to planning for what comes next.

What happens when every advisory conversation, every decision and every client question still depends on you?

In this episode of Advisory Conversations, Tim and Deb reflect on why they created APX Training and how practice owners can start breaking the bottleneck that holds their advisory services back.

They explore how building an advisory team, using interactive client education and developing repeatable processes can free up valuable time, create new revenue opportunities and help your team deliver more value to clients.

They also discuss a simple but important distinction: education isn't the same as advisory and understanding the difference could change how your practice operates.

If you're ready to grow your advisory services without everything resting on your shoulders, this conversation is for you.

Knowing what we know now, what would we do differently if we were starting our accounting and bookkeeping practices again?

The answer might be simpler than you think: we wouldn’t do it alone.

In this episode of Advisory Conversations, Tim and Deb reflect on their own experiences of building practices and why they would build a team much earlier if they had the opportunity to start again.

They discuss how to plan for growth, avoid becoming the bottleneck and gradually develop your team's confidence to have more valuable conversations with clients.

And if you're already running an established practice, don't worry, it's never too late to rethink how your business operates and start building a team capable of delivering more without everything depending on you.

SPECIAL EPISODE 🎙️

What actually happens inside an APX LIVE Implementation Cohort — and what will you have built by the end of the 10 weeks?

In this special Q&A episode, guest host Lynn Graham puts the questions to APX founders Tim Seymour and Deb Halliday ahead of the final LIVE Implementation Cohort of 2026, starting on Tuesday 29th September at 12.30pm.

We talk about why we created APX in the first place, the bottleneck we kept seeing as practice owners moved into advisory, and why learning how to deliver advisory is only part of the answer.

Because at some point, advisory has to move beyond the owner.

That's where the LIVE Implementation Cohort comes in.

Lynn asks us about what happens during the 10 weeks, what we expect from those taking part and, importantly, what you'll actually implement along the way.

This isn't just another training course.

Each week we'll work together to turn what you're learning into practical processes you can use in your practice. You'll build your own SOPs, take them back to your team, start implementing them and come back the following week with accountability from us to keep things moving.

We also talk about the wider APX Mentorship that sits around the cohort — including the self-paced learning, ongoing support, Polly our AI Coach, our Business Course Library, community and WhatsApp support, and the Financial Strategies that continue the journey beyond the initial 10 weeks.

The aim?

For you to finish the cohort having done far more than simply learn about Advisory Teams.

You'll have started building one.

You'll have the processes, SOPs and foundations in place to continue developing your team and move into 2027 ready to make Advisory Teams a real focus within your practice.

Our final LIVE Implementation Cohort of 2026 starts:

📅 Tuesday 29th September 2026

⏰ 12.30pm UK time

If you've been thinking about moving advisory beyond yourself and developing your team to deliver it with you, this episode will give you a really good look at what we'll be doing together.

Find out more and sign up at apxtraining.co.uk

You can learn the skills of advisory. But becoming an advisor is about more than learning new skills.

In this episode of Advisory Conversations, Tim and Deb are joined by Hetty Verney to explore the often-overlooked shift from technician to advisor: changing the identity you see yourself as.

They talk about the beliefs, self-doubt and subconscious patterns that can keep practice owners stuck in familiar ways of working, even when they know they want something different.

Hetty also shares her own journey with belief coding and how uncovering the patterns holding her back helped her step into a new identity, build a team and move forward.

If you know where you want your practice to go, but something keeps pulling you back, this conversation is worth listening to.

What happens to your clients, your team and your business when you’re not there?

In this episode of Advisory Conversations, Tim and Deb share their real-life experiences of building teams capable of delivering advisory without the practice owner at the centre of everything.

From taking a planned month away from the business to dealing with an unexpected personal crisis, Deb explains how having the right people, systems and processes in place meant her clients continued to be supported without everything falling back on her.

They also explore why developing an advisory team is about more than freeing up your time. It’s about building resilience, empowering your people and ensuring your clients can continue moving forward — even when life doesn’t go to plan.

If you’re still the person everyone relies on, this conversation might give you something to think about.

It’s something we hear from accountants and bookkeepers who know they want to move into advisory, but aren’t quite sure they have the skills to do it.

Here’s the thing:

Being a good advisor isn’t something you’re simply born knowing how to do.

It can be learned.

In this episode of Advisory Conversations, Tim Seymour and Deb Halliday explore what it really takes to move from technician to advisor — and why the skills that made you good at compliance aren’t necessarily the same skills you need to have meaningful advisory conversations.

As accountants and bookkeepers, we already have an enormous amount of information about our clients and their businesses.

The question is: what are we doing with it?

If we’re simply collecting the numbers, processing them and reporting them to HMRC, we’re missing an opportunity.

Those same numbers can help us spot patterns, identify problems, ask better questions and help clients understand what is really happening in their business.

That’s where advisory begins.

But knowing the numbers is only part of it.

Advisory also requires communication, listening, curiosity and emotional intelligence. It means learning how to ask the right questions, uncover what’s really going on and turn financial information into something a client can actually understand and act upon.

And these are all skills that can be developed.

Tim and Deb also discuss what AI means for the future of the profession.

Technology can process information faster than we ever could. AI can analyse data, identify patterns and produce reports.

But there’s still something incredibly important that sits on the human side of advisory:

The conversation.

Understanding the person behind the business. Recognising when what they’re saying isn’t necessarily the whole story. Asking another question. Listening. Building trust. And helping someone make a decision when the answer isn’t always obvious.

That human connection matters.

And if we want advisory to become part of the way a practice works — rather than something only the owner can deliver — those skills need to be developed across the team.

• What really changes when you move from technician to advisor
• Why advisory skills can be learned
• Using the financial information you already have more effectively
• Moving beyond reporting the numbers to helping clients use them
• Developing better questioning, listening and communication skills
• Why emotional intelligence matters in advisory
• What AI can — and can’t — replace
• Developing advisory capability across the whole team
• Creating a more consistent, collaborative approach to client advisory

You already understand the numbers.

The next step is learning how to use them to start better conversations, create meaningful insights and help your clients make better business decisions.

That’s the journey from Technician → Advisor.

Read more about Advisory Teams:

https://advisoryteams.co.uk

Explore APX Training:

https://apxtraining.co.uk

Join our free Advisory Teams community:

https://facebook.com/groups/advisoryteams

In this episode of Advisory Conversations, Tim Seymour and Deb Halliday are joined by Dublin-based bookkeeper and Xero specialist Lynn Graham to talk about her own journey from hospitality into bookkeeping — and how her practice has evolved over the last decade.

Lynn’s story will be familiar to many bookkeepers and accountants.

You start by doing the work. You build your technical knowledge. You take on clients. You get busier.

But eventually you realise that technology and automation can do much of the heavy lifting — and that creates an opportunity to do something far more valuable with your time.

Talk to your clients.

Lynn shares how embracing cloud accounting and Xero helped her streamline the compliance work and create more space for the conversations that really matter: helping clients understand their numbers, what they mean and what they could do next.

And that transition isn’t simply about adding “advisory” to an already busy workload.

If everything still relies on you, you’ve just created another bottleneck.

Tim, Deb and Lynn talk about building better systems, using technology intelligently and developing the skills and confidence needed to move beyond simply producing the numbers.

They also discuss something that can be overlooked when you’re building a practice — you don’t have to do it alone.

Mentorship, training, community and having other people around you to share experiences, ideas and challenges can make an enormous difference.

Because moving into advisory isn’t about suddenly having all the answers.

It’s about learning to have better conversations, explaining financial information in a way clients actually understand and using the numbers to help them make better decisions.

• Lynn’s journey from hospitality into bookkeeping
• How her practice has evolved over the last decade
• Moving from compliance work towards advisory conversations
• Using Xero, cloud accounting and automation to create capacity
• Why becoming more efficient shouldn’t simply mean taking on more work
• Helping clients understand their numbers without unnecessary jargon
• Avoiding the owner becoming the bottleneck
• The value of mentorship, training and professional community
• Why collaboration matters when you’re building and growing a practice

Technology can process the numbers.

The real opportunity is what you do with the time, information and conversations it creates.

You want to grow advisory.

You know your clients need more than compliance.

But there’s a problem that catches out a lot of accounting and bookkeeping practice owners:

All the advisory still depends on you.

You’re the person having the conversations, spotting the opportunities, asking the questions and helping clients make decisions. And as more clients want that support, your workload grows with it.

Instead of advisory creating a more valuable, scalable practice, you’ve simply created another job for yourself.

In this episode of Advisory Conversations, Tim Seymour and Deb Halliday talk about the advisory bottleneck — why it happens, how they’ve experienced it in their own practices, and why the answer isn’t simply for the owner to work harder.

It’s about building an advisory team.

A team where advisory capability doesn’t sit with one person. Where technicians can develop into advisors, conversations can be shared, and different members of the team can contribute their skills, experience and perspective to create better outcomes for clients.

Tim and Deb also explore what needs to change when you move from an owner-led advisory model to a team-delivered one — from developing people and building confidence to creating a shared approach to the way advisory is delivered.

Because there’s one very simple question every practice owner should be able to answer:

What happens to your advisory service when you’re not there?

If the answer is “it stops”, you haven’t built a scalable advisory service yet.

You’ve built an advisory bottleneck.

• Why practice owners so easily become the advisory bottleneck
• Why adding advisory to an already full workload isn’t sustainable
• The difference between owner-led and team-delivered advisory
• How developing your team creates capacity for growth
• Why advisory doesn’t need to be delivered by one “expert”
• The importance of communication and collaboration across the team
• Tim and Deb’s own experiences of moving beyond owner dependency
• The question every practice owner should ask about what happens when they’re absent

Advisory shouldn’t depend on one person.

Build the capability across the team, and you can create something far more valuable — for your clients, your people and your practice.

APX Training:

https://apxtraining.co.uk

Join our free Advisory Teams community:

https://facebook.com/groups/advisoryteams