Expert Insights: Managing Partner Andy Starnes on Going Beyond Compliance

Watch our recent video interview as Managing Partner Andy Starnes discusses how Moore Colson partners with our clients to provide advisory services that help them and their businesses move forward into the future.

Read the Transcript

[Andy Starnes]

00:00:02
We often get asked about compliance versus advisory services, and they need to be complementary of each other. We need to be able to provide the expert service that goes along with compliance, a tax return and an audit, but also be able to provide the advisory services that help us go forward. Our clients are gonna face challenges that they didn’t anticipate. We want to be there and be that sounding board for them. We wanna be the problem solver and solution finder.

00:00:25
When you leave compliance and you start looking at advisory work, there’s really two things you can do to make sure you’re staying abreast of problems your clients may face. The first is for an expert service area to make sure you understand a changing landscape. So we live in a complex and changing world, and we need to be able to take the problems that are coming to our clients and break them down into simple solutions. The second is we like to stay very active in industry associations where our clients work. So we want to understand what’s facing them in an external environment. That may not necessarily be a compliance service that we handle, but it’s gonna be challenges they face, and we need to help them, guide them through those problems.

00:00:58
We want our partners to have a shift in mindset. We want them to be thinking about problems going forward and problems that will come to a client versus looking backwards. So if you think about it in terms of a car, most of the CPA profession looks in the rearview mirror. They perform audits, they prepare tax returns that are looking backwards. We want our partners to partner with our clients and look out the windshield.

00:01:20
Our strongest client relationships are the ones where we’ve done deep advisory work, and that can be traditional things that clients think about from tax planning to helping them set up an accounting system. But it can also be much more complex things, transactional due diligence, multi-generational planning, or even, you know, business transition planning within a management team.

00:01:41
We’re very fortunate. Greg Colson was a great, trusted business advisor. That’s the principles he founded this firm on. For those of us that grew up here, we didn’t know any different. We expect everyone to serve clients. We would expect them to have an advisory mindset and to take clients forward to you know, where they want to go.