“If I was your brother, what advice would you give me?”

A client asked me a question recently that I haven’t been able to shake. “Emma, if I was your brother, what advice would you give me?”

He runs a business that’s grown fast over the past three years. Good problem to have, except growth doesn’t stay simple for long. He’d come to our pre year end meeting with what looked like a straightforward question: could he afford to bring on another salesperson?

I could have looked at his cash flow forecast and his accounts and given him a yes or a no. The numbers would have supported either answer, honestly. But a number on its own doesn’t tell you whether hiring is the right move, only whether you can technically absorb the cost. So instead of answering his question, I asked him some of my own.

Why did he want to hire? What return was he expecting, and by when? What happens to the business if the new hire didn’t perform the way he hoped? Could he support the cost while they found their feet, and who was actually going to manage them day to day?

And then the one that mattered most: was hiring a salesperson the best way to solve the problem he was trying to solve, or was it a symptom he was treating rather than the cause?

He sat with that for a moment. It turned out the real issue wasn’t a lack of people selling. It was that his existing team had no clear process for following up warm leads, so enquiries were going cold before anyone got back to them. A new salesperson would have inherited the same broken process and probably hit the same wall.

That’s the moment his question asking what I would advice if he was family made sense to me. He wasn’t really asking about profit, cash flow or headcount. He was asking whether he could trust my judgement, and whether I’d tell him something challenging but insightful.

I think that’s a question every business owner should be putting to their adviser, whether they realise it or not.

Knowing more than the numbers

Getting to that answer meant knowing more than his P&L. It meant knowing where the business had come from, what he was actually trying to build, and which risks he was prepared to take versus which ones kept him up at night. He’d mentioned, almost in passing, that he wanted to be able to step back from the day-to-day within two years. That reshaped the whole conversation. A quick sales hire to plug a gap looks very different from a decision that needs to hold up once he’s no longer in the business five days a week.

That’s the part of the job that doesn’t show up on an invoice. Accurate accounts and returns filed on time are the foundation, they have to be right. But on their own they don’t tell you what a decision means for the life someone’s trying to build. You need to know both to give advice that’s actually useful.

Telling him what he needed to hear

It would have been easier to just approve the hire. Nobody enjoys being the person who tells a client to slow down. But if I wouldn’t have given the same answer to my own brother, I had no business giving it to him. Good advice depends on trust, and trust depends on honesty, even when the honest answer isn’t the one someone was hoping for.

So we didn’t talk about hiring that day. We talked about fixing the follow-up process first, and revisited the sales question three months later once we could see whether that alone had closed the gap. It had, mostly. He ended up hiring six months later than planned, for a different reason than the one he’d walked in with, and with a much clearer idea of what success would look like.

Why the timing mattered

None of that would have been possible after his year end, once the accounts were finished and the tax bill was fixed. Meeting four to ten weeks ahead of it meant we still had room to act on what the numbers were telling him. That’s why we treat the pre year end meeting as one of the most valuable conversations we have with any client, not just a box to tick before the deadline. For some clients that’s a focused tax review. For others, like this one, it’s a fuller strategic conversation, sometimes with their IFA in the room too, because building a business and building wealth from it need the same joined-up thinking.

What this actually comes down to

Running a business can be a lonely job. You don’t need someone who sends you an invoice once a year and files your accounts away until the next deadline. You need someone who knows enough about your business to say, honestly, “if this were mine, here’s what I’d do,” and who’s willing to ask the harder question before giving you the easy answer.

That’s what we try to be for every client at A4G, whether you’ve worked with us for years or you’re weighing up whether to. If you’re already a client, your Principal Adviser can talk you through which of our three pre year end meeting options fits you best this year. If you’re not yet, get in touch and we’ll show you what that conversation looks like.