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Staying curious with your clients transforms your relationship from transactional to advisory. Angie Toney, CEO of Oasis Tax Advisory Services and founder of The Executive Touch, shares tactical advice on creating a more sophisticated firm by aligning recommendations with client follow-through and developing staff using hands-on, case-based learning.
—Interview by Lauren Ward, edited by Bianca Prieto
A lot of tax firm owners say they want to offer more strategic guidance, but aren’t sure where to start. What’s the first shift they need to make in how they approach client relationships?
The first shift is to stop seeing yourself as “the person who files the return” and start seeing yourself as the advisor who guides clients to make financial decisions that align with their lifestyle and goals.
That sounds simple, but it changes the conversation entirely.
Instead of starting with forms, deadlines or compliance, start asking questions about goals. What are they trying to build? What matters to them? What keeps them up at night financially? What are they willing or not willing to do?
Good advisory starts with curiosity. Technical knowledge matters, of course, but clients stay because they feel understood. The best planning happens when the advisor understands the person behind the numbers.
Every tax advisor has experienced a client who could benefit from a strategy but doesn’t want the complexity. How do you decide when to push versus when to step back?
I learned early on that the “best” strategy is not always the right strategy. You can create a beautiful plan on paper, but if the client is not going to maintain it, document it or follow through, then it becomes risky very quickly.
I ask myself a simple question: Will this client realistically implement this?
Sometimes a client has the income for an advanced strategy but not the discipline or desire to maintain complexity. That is okay. My job is not to win an argument or impress someone with how much I know. My job is to help clients make decisions they can confidently sustain. Sometimes that means simplifying instead of maximizing.
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As firms grow, advisory work often stays concentrated with the owner. How can firm owners start building a team that can deliver the same level of strategic insight?
This is where a lot of firms get stuck. The owner becomes the bottleneck because all of the higher-level thinking lives in their head. The answer is not to expect someone on your team to magically “think like you.” You have to teach your thought process.
Start documenting how you think through cases. Why did you recommend one entity over another? Why did you push back on a strategy? What questions do you always ask?
Then create opportunities for your team to sit in on conversations and hear real advisory discussions. I’m a big believer in case-based learning because strategy is contextual. People need to hear the nuance. You are not just delegating tasks. You are developing judgment.
Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunity for tax and accounting firms that want to grow? What are these firms doing differently from everyone else?
The biggest opportunity is helping clients make decisions before the tax return is filed.
The most valuable work in tax rarely happens during compliance. It happens months earlier, when business owners are making decisions around compensation, entity structure, retirement, acquisitions, hiring or cash flow.
The firms growing the fastest are moving away from being reactive and becoming proactive. They are having more conversations, asking better questions, meeting with clients throughout the year and positioning themselves as part of the decision-making process rather than the cleanup process.
Technology and AI will absolutely improve efficiency, but relationships, judgment and strategic thinking are what will separate firms in the years ahead.
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The Net Gains’ Take
The compliance work will always be there. What Toney is describing is the layer on top of it—the conversations that happen before the return is filed, when business owners are still deciding. Getting into that room requires curiosity, not just credentials. Firms that make that shift stop competing on price and start competing on judgment, which is a much harder thing to replace.
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