If advisory in your firm still depends on “that one partner who’s brilliant in client meetings”, you’re not alone…

Most firms want to scale advisory. But in reality, it’s stuck in a loop:

• the partner runs the best conversations

• everyone else tries to copy it

• the “process” lives in people’s heads

• and every new hire starts from scratch (again)

Meanwhile, demand for advisory keeps climbing. In the latest CPA.com / AICPA PCPS Client Advisory Services (CAS) benchmark survey, firms projected a median 99% growth in CAS revenue over three years. That’s basically “we’d like to double this”. Great news… unless delivery is still bottlenecked by two humans and a heroic spreadsheet.

We’re Vinyl. We build an AI meeting assistant for accounting firms. And we’ve seen a practical way to standardise and scale advisory without turning your team into robots.

It’s a simple loop:

Capture → Distil → Train → Coach → Enrich client context → Repeat

Let’s unpack it.

Why advisory doesn’t scale in most firms

The “invisible playbook” problem

Partners are good at advisory because they’ve built judgement over years:

• what questions to ask (and in what order)

• how to steer a messy conversation back to outcomes

• how to handle pushback without sounding like a sales script

• how to turn numbers into decisions

But that knowledge is usually tacit. It’s not in a manual. It’s not in a checklist. It’s in the partner’s brain… and in the way they run meetings.

The “we’re too busy to document it” problem

Even if a partner wants to document their approach, it rarely happens. Not because they’re lazy, but because they’re slammed.

And meetings are already eating up the week. Not to mention the post-meeting admin tax: writing up meeting notes, adding them to practice management systems, sending follow-up emails, etc.

So “let’s document the advisory methodology” becomes one of those lovely ideas that lives in a Notion page titled Advisory Playbook v0.1 (WIP).

1) Capture partner expertise where it already exists: in real meetings

Advisory isn’t a PDF. It’s a conversation.

Quarterly business reviews (QBR's). Cashflow calls. Pricing discussions. Strategy sessions. The best firms already have the raw material for standardisation — it’s just trapped in meeting recordings (or worse, someone’s memory).

Vinyl’s first job is boring-in-a-good-way: we help you capture those advisory meetings without adding admin. That matters because bad meetings don’t just waste time — they create a hangover.

When you capture meetings properly, you get:

• a searchable record of what was actually said

• consistent notes and actions

• and a trail of context that doesn’t vanish when someone’s on leave (or leaves the firm)

2) Distil partner know-how into a repeatable playbook

Here’s where things get interesting.

Instead of asking partners to “write down how you do advisory”, we can work backwards:

1. Select a set of strong examples (say, the last 10–20 QBRs run by your best advisory partner).

2. Analyse those transcripts together.

3. Extract the patterns.

That gives you an actual playbook built from real client work — not theory.

What a “playbook” can include (without becoming a novel)

From a batch of similar meetings, you can typically pull:

• A meeting structure (opening, diagnostic, insight, decisions, actions)

• A question bank (the prompts that reliably unlock useful answers)

• Common client objections (and the responses that work)

• Red flags (signals the conversation is drifting into “reporting mode”)

• Next-step templates (how actions are framed, assigned, and followed up)

And because it’s based on actual transcripts, it captures the language that works — the phrases partners use to challenge assumptions without starting a war.

3) Turn the playbook into training juniors will actually use

Traditional training often looks like this:

• “sit in on a few calls”

• “read this doc”

• “have a go”

• “we’ll review later”

It’s not terrible. It’s just slow. And inconsistent.

Once you’ve captured meetings and extracted a framework, juniors can learn by asking grounded questions across many real examples — not just the one call they happened to shadow last Tuesday.

Examples of the kinds of questions juniors can ask

Here are a few we see a lot:

The goal isn’t to turn juniors into copycats. It’s to shorten the “awkward middle phase” where they know the numbers but don’t yet know how to guide a commercial conversation.

And yes — it also helps partners stop repeating the same coaching points like they’re stuck in a Groundhog Day remake for accountants.

4) Coach and quality-check delivery without becoming the meeting police

Standardising advisory isn’t just documenting what “good” looks like. It’s helping the whole team deliver it consistently.

Once you’ve got a framework, you can review meetings against it and give feedback with evidence.

A simple scoring rubric (example)

For a Quaretly Business Review style meeting, you might score:

• Preparation: did they bring the right context into the call?

• Discovery: did they ask the key diagnostic questions?

• Insight: did they interpret, not just report?

• Direction: did the conversation land on decisions or priorities?

• Next steps: are actions clear, owned, and time-bound?

With transcripts, coaching becomes less “I didn’t love the vibe of that meeting” and more “you skipped discovery, so the recommendation landed flat”.

It’s also kinder. Nobody enjoys mysterious feedback.

5) Build a client narrative that survives staff changes

Even strong firms lose context. People get promoted, move teams, go on parental leave, or leave. And suddenly the client relationship history becomes:

• last year’s accounts

• a task list

• a few scattered emails

• maybe a note saying “client worried about cashflow”

Meeting context is often the missing layer. It contains:

• goals and priorities (“we’re trying to open a second site by September”)

• constraints (“cash is tight until Christmas”)

• decision rationale (“we’re holding off hiring because…”)

• internal dynamics (“I need to convince my co-founder”)

When you add that to your existing tools (practice management timelines, workpapers, advisory apps), you get a much more complete profile — sometimes the most useful view of the client short of reading their bank feed and sitting in their office.

What changes when you do all four?

When you combine the four angles — playbooks, training, coaching, and client narrative — a few practical things happen:

• Partners stop being the only “advisory engine” in the firm.

• Juniors ramp faster because they can learn from patterns, not anecdotes.

• Meeting quality becomes more consistent, even across different offices and managers.

• Client context stops leaking out of the business every time someone changes role.

• Advisory becomes a system, not a personality trait.

Also, and we say this with love: fewer people have to write “see last meeting notes” when there are no last meeting notes.

A quick reality check (because life happens)

None of this requires perfect data, perfect meetings, or a perfect firm.

It starts with what you already have: real advisory conversations, run by the people who are already good at them.

And it builds something firms rarely get time to build otherwise:

A repeatable way to deliver advisory that doesn’t depend on cloning your best partner (which, legally and ethically, is probably for the best).