11 Ways Tax Planning Can Grow Your Firm

Start Slideshow

The addition of tax planning services to a financial advisory firm can yield a wide range of benefits and represents a significant organic growth opportunity, according to Angie Herbers, managing partner at financial advisory management consultant firm Herbers & Company.

Her company has been using tax planning as an organic growth strategy “for a lot of years [and] it is one of our number one organic growth strategies,” she said Thursday during Holistiplan’s online 2022 Fall Tax Planning Summit.

“Today, only 18% of accountants out there are actually doing tax planning advisory services,” she pointed out. “This gives financial planners a huge opportunity to fill a big need and also to help their clients in an area that clients really need help.”

A lot of accountants are “focused more on the technical advice and the tax returns than on future planning,” she noted.

Additionally, even among accountants who are “actually giving tax planning advice” to some degree, “only one in three of their clients are actually getting it and usually they get it by asking,” she said. “So if the client isn’t asking for tax advice, then they aren’t getting it from their accountants.”

And of the clients who are asking for tax planning advice, they are being charged hourly, she said. On average, clients who are getting tax planning advice from accountants are paying $2,350 a year extra for it, she noted.

Summing it up, she said, tax planning is “not only a service to clients [and] a value add to clients, but it is the number one organic growth strategy we’ve been using.” In the nearly two decades she’s been using it, it “works every time,” she added.

Read through the gallery to seethe reasons Herbers gave for advisors to add tax planning services.

Start Slideshow