Are Your Advisers Really The Best Fit For You?

You choose the best advisers you can find at the time, but that doesn’t mean that you have to stick with the same ones for life. Don’t be afraid to make a change if you outgrow one of your advisers such that someone you are currently using isn’t the best fit for your current situation anymore.

I know there is a loyalty factor, but is that really serving you? Is sticking with someone you have outgrown serving either of you well?

If you feel you have outgrown a particular adviser, you will no longer be happy with them and their services and thus you won't be referring them, and if it has gotten way past time to replace them, you might actually be bad mouthing them, so they are losing out as well.

If you have grown beyond you current adviser, then it is time to find a replacement. Even worse if that adviser is holding you back from your potential and where you want to go, then you must make a change.

I know I stayed with a CPA that wasn’t the best fit for me for several years beyond what my gut told me, because I felt like I couldn’t make a change. Changing to a new adviser is always hard, there is time to do research to find them and/or ask for referrals from colleagues and then interview several to see if they will be a better fit than the current one.

Yuck! That isn't how I want to be spending my time, and I'm sure you feel the same, but if you are thinking about it, then it is likely time to make a change and the longer you procrastinate, the worse things will get.

For years I was of the mindset that financial statements were only for the big guys, and that though was reinforced by that same CPA I was using at the time who refused to create them for me.

I had asked him to create those financial statements in support of a proposal that I was submitting for a bid on a government contract and one of the requirements for that proposal was to include 2 years worth of financial statements.

When my CPA wouldn’t create them for me for that bid on the government contract, I educated myself and then through something together so I could include that in my bid, but it gave me serious doubts if that CPA was really the advisor that I needed for my business.

If you read my recent article Isn't My Business Too Small To Worry About Financial Statements?, you know that I think I have totally shifted my view and now think that financial statements are critical to the ongoing success of your Independent Contracting business. The fact that my old CPA wouldn’t create them for me should have been a red flag, but change is sometimes hard, and for whatever reasons I justified in my head, and I was unable to make the decision to make the change at the time.

It took me a couple more years of them providing the basics, but nothing more, plus some internal changes at the CPA firm itself before I followed my gut and made the change and moved my business to a new firm.

The change in CPA was something that I had obviously been considering for a while, but the final straw had been when I found a mentor that explained financial statements in terms I understood, and demonstrated to me their importance even to a small business like mine.

That convinced me that if my CPA wouldn’t provide that basic service, then I had definitely outgrown their services altogether and needed to make the change.

Have you had a similar experience where it was time to change advisers, but you didn’t do it in a timely manner? I’d love to hear your experiences below.