Capital.
Forecast.
Story.
What you allocate this year is the story your board reads next year.
This briefing tells you which capital-allocation decisions become 10x bets in accounting and CFO advisory as AI compresses the cost stack. Read it before your peers send their version to the board.
The 10-page briefing. Worth 20 minutes.
One email. One PDF. Worth twenty minutes of your week.
We send it once. Work emails only.
Every CFO or Managing Partner at a mid-sized European advisory firm has had the same Tuesday morning. Four things on the screen at 8:30. The fourth compliance proposal this quarter lost to Aspia on price. A senior partner's retirement timing email arrived over the weekend. Big 4 poached your second-best advisory lead last month at a package you could not match. A PE-backed consolidator landed on Monday, polite and patient, "keen to explore a conversation about your firm's next chapter."
You have signed five three-year plans for this partnership. The pattern used to be simple. Hold the client book, hold the compliance margin, introduce the junior partner when retirement lands. The job has not changed in fifty years. The bar has risen on every measure of doing it, simultaneously, and the contradictions you have been living with since you took the seat are suddenly re-openable.
The partner-IP extraction project you sell your owner-managed clients is the one you have not yet run on your own firm. The cobbler's children have no shoes.
This is the question your partnership council is already asking. The briefing below is what you want in your hand before the next council meeting.
Capital Allocation. Forecast Credibility. Value-Creation Narrative.
Three questions every advisory-firm CFO is tracking. The first is the crux. The other two are how you earn the right to answer it.
Where does the next €5M actually compound?
Tuck-in acquisition, advisory-capability build, lateral-hire envelope, partner-IP extraction infrastructure, AI-compliance platform. Today's default: the Managing Partner drives, the IT Director buys, the CFO countersigns, and the capital-allocation authority slides away from the seat.
Why did the mix print below plan, and what is the partner-level story?
Your partnership voted on a 45% advisory mix. Your last quarter printed 32%. Your Head of FP&A cannot walk the council through the partner-by-partner migration story. The proposal-loss signal sits in CRM notes. The lateral-retention signal sits in People conversations. The client-concentration data sits in a WIP system built for billing.
What does this firm do that compounds faster than peers?
Your partnership wants the five-year plan. Your banking syndicate wants the covenant-review pack. A consolidator wants the first-conversation deck. Three audiences, three documents, three partners, and the numbers underneath them do not match.
What you get when you download
An 11-page report for Chief Financial Officers and Managing Partners at mid-market European accounting and CFO advisory firms. Designed to be read in one sitting before your next partnership council.
Your industry, your firm, and why they are one problem
What is happening in mid-market accounting and CFO advisory as a sector. What is happening inside your capital, your three-year plan, your pricing architecture, your junior bench, and your practice-equity thesis right now. And the intersection most firms have not named yet: you do not have three scorecard problems, you have one.
Four moves across capital, forecast, pricing, and narrative
Route the next €5M through a single alternatives analysis, not five separate meetings. Rebuild the plan as a live monthly driver graph, not an annual WIP roll-forward. Migrate pricing from one rate-card mechanic to three. Run the partner-IP extraction project on your own firm before the first retirement.
Five questions for your next partnership council
The €5M tuck-in question. The 45%-plan-32%-print question. The three-pricing-mechanics question. The three-audiences-one-thesis question. The partner-IP extraction question. Where your partnership leadership cannot agree on the answer is the conversation worth an hour on the agenda.
Calibrated for each seat at the table.