How Syzygy Builds Trust with our Clients
If you’ve seen our post about working with out-of-house accountants, you’ll know that establishing trust with our clients as quickly as possible is pivotal to forming a healthy and long-lasting relationship with them. But as we well know, this is easier said than done. We’re new to most of our clients’ lives as well as to their businesses, and inviting us in to not only see, but manage, the most sensitive and confidential parts of their companies takes both a leap of faith and some time to build rapport and confidence in our work. Our job as partners is to respect that this process takes time, and to move forward at a pace that works for our clients. That said, we’ve done this enough to know how we can show, early on, that we’re on your side.
Taking it all in
Our first step with clients, even before signing an agreement, is to ask lots of questions about their business. Just like any experts, we know which questions need to be asked immediately to glean fundamental insights about our new client. Organizations, just like people, are entirely unique, even within an industry. Although we’ve seen it all, our first step in establishing trust with our clients is taking in enough information about their businesses that we feel we can trust ourselves to handle their finances. This information excavation allows us to form a complete, three-dimensional understanding of the business: its goals, vulnerabilities, and barriers, all of which shape the way we approach the work and offer support.
Absolute honesty
Once we feel we’ve achieved an understanding of the business and its finances, we commit ourselves to always, always tell it like it is – good, bad, or ugly. Our clients often come to us from an accounting team that lacked transparency, didn’t communicate effectively, and delivered either confusing or incorrect reports. Their accounting support often hasn’t been trustworthy, and definitely hasn’t been a resource for them. Understandably, this undermines the confidence you have as a business owner in the integrity of your accounting department. You might feel the need to maintain tight control over cash because you’ve been burned – or singed—in the past. We get it and we don’t take it personally. As soon as we understand our clients’ financial information, we tell them the whole truth about it – they immediately know how much cash the company really has, how much money they have in the company, and if there are any urgent changes to be made or considered. We give our clients clear visibility into what’s happening in their business with consistent, understandable reporting that helps establish confidence that we’re worthy of handling something so precious. By the time our clients see their year-end financial statements, they’re old news – they already know where things stand.
Process
The other critical element of establishing trust is establishing process. From the outset, our clients always know exactly what to expect from us, and they get it 100% of the time. Trusting that we’ll be reliable and don’t need extensive oversight or management, again, takes time. We find a process that lives within our clients’ comfort zones and we execute the heck out of that process, knowing that they’ll soon find relief that they don’t need to brace for the next big SNAFU in their accounting department. Because this is what we do for a living, sometimes we also have suggestions on how our clients can think differently about their processes – even the ones that don’t involve us – to help support the growth of their business overall. One of the things we love about working with our clients is developing a real sense of partnership with them (which we write about here), so that the responsibility of owning a business feels less solitary. We show up for both the joys of big wins and the challenges of setbacks and make sure that the financial approach supports both.
If you are ready to disentangle yourself from your business’ accounting but worried about whether there’s a solution out there worthy of your trust, you’re not alone – but huge growth potential for your business lies in finding a partner to help you let go, step by step, until you trust they’ve got your back. Syzygy might just be that partner.