Your clients already ask you about software. Which payroll app should they use? Is that CRM worth the money? Why did the card statement jump this quarter? Most firms answer these questions for free, in passing, and move on.
That’s an advisory service hiding in your inbox. You already have the trust, the access to the numbers, and a view across your clients’ spend. What’s usually missing is structure: a defined offer, a repeatable process, and a price.
This guide gives you that structure in 90 days. It isn’t a transformation programme. It’s three focused months that take you from “we sometimes help with apps” to a service line you can name, sell and deliver consistently.
Why 90 days works
Ninety days is long enough to run real client engagements and learn from them. It’s also short enough that the project doesn’t drift into next year’s plans.
It also fits the way firms work. One month to set up, one month to pilot with a handful of clients, and one month to package what worked and roll it out. By the end, you’ll have evidence from your own clients rather than a theory.
Before you start: three decisions
Make these three calls in week one. They’ll save you from rethinking the whole plan halfway through.
1. Who owns it. One person needs to be accountable for the service line. It doesn’t have to be a partner, and it doesn’t need a new hire. A senior manager who already fields client software questions is often the right fit.
2. What the service is and isn’t. App advisory means helping clients understand, rationalise and get more value from the software they pay for. It doesn’t mean becoming their IT support desk. Write that boundary down now, because clients will test it.
3. What you’ll call it. “Software review,” “technology advisory” or “app stack review” are all fine. Pick a name clients will understand without an explanation, and use it consistently.
Days 1–30: Build the foundations
Choose your pilot clients
Pick five to ten existing clients for the pilot. The best candidates:
- have a growing team and a growing list of subscriptions
- have mentioned software costs or frustrations in the past year
- trust you enough to give honest feedback on a new service
Leave out your most complex clients for now. You want pilots that teach you the process, not ones that swallow the quarter.
Get visibility into their software
You can’t advise on a stack you can’t see. For each pilot client, build a picture of:
- every app they pay for, and who owns it internally
- what each one costs, and how it’s billed
- when each subscription renews
- which apps overlap in function
You can assemble this manually from bank feeds, card statements and invoices. For five clients, that’s workable. For fifty, it isn’t, which is why the tooling decision matters (more on that below).
Define your review framework
Decide what every review will look at, so each client gets the same standard of advice. A useful starting frame covers four areas:
- Compliance & Security: Are there tools holding client or customer data that nobody is managing? Are former staff still on paid seats?
- Stack Standardisation: Are there duplicate tools doing the same job? Is there a clear “one tool per job” principle?
- Business Digitalisation: Where is the client still running processes on spreadsheets or email that software should handle?
- Recharge: Can the firm manage the client’s software billing in a way that simplifies things for them and adds a margin line for you?
Days 31–60: Run the pilot
Deliver your first reviews
Run a review for each pilot client. Keep the first version simple: a clear summary of what they’re paying for, what’s overlapping, what’s up for renewal, and three to five recommendations ranked by impact.
The deliverable matters more than the analysis behind it. A client should be able to read it in ten minutes and know what to do next. A report they can hold and forward to a co-founder will do more for you than a dashboard login they’ll never open.
Hold the conversation, not just the handover
Book a 30-minute call to walk through each review. This is where the service actually sells itself. When the client sees their full stack laid out for the first time, the follow-up questions come naturally:
- “Can you help us cancel these?”
- “Can you keep an eye on renewals for us?”
- “What should we use instead?”
Every one of those questions is the start of an ongoing engagement. Note them down, because they’ll shape how you package the service in month three.
Track what you learn
For each pilot, record:
- how long the review took to prepare
- which findings the client cared about most
- what follow-up work they asked for
- whether they’d pay for it, and roughly how much
Be honest about time. If a review took twice as long as you expected, that’s the most important data point you’ll collect, because it decides your pricing.
Days 61–90: Package, price and roll out
Turn the pilot into a defined offer
Look at what your pilot clients valued and build tiers around it. A common structure:
- Entry review: A one-off assessment of the client’s stack, with prioritised recommendations. This is your foot in the door.
- Deep review: A fuller analysis covering spend, overlap, security gaps and a roadmap. It suits clients who are scaling or restructuring.
- Ongoing advisory: Renewal monitoring, quarterly reviews and on-call advice, billed as a monthly retainer.
The entry review wins the client. The retainer is where the service line becomes a business.
Price it
Price the entry review as a fixed fee, low enough that it’s an easy yes and high enough to cover your time. Price the ongoing advisory as a monthly retainer that matches the client’s size and complexity.
Two principles help here. First, anchor your price to the value of the findings, not the hours spent. Second, keep it fixed. Clients buy fixed-fee advisory far more readily than open-ended time billing.
Roll it out to the wider client base
With a defined offer and pilot results, you’re ready to introduce the service more widely:
- Add a short section on software to your year-end or quarterly client meetings.
- Flag upcoming renewals as a natural reason to start the conversation.
- Ask your pilot clients if you can share their (anonymised) outcomes with others.
- Brief your whole team, so anyone who hears a client software question knows where to route it.
Four mistakes to avoid
- Trying to cover every client at once. A focused pilot teaches you more than a firm-wide launch that nobody has time to deliver.
- Drifting into IT support. Advisory is about decisions: what to keep, what to cut, what to buy. Password resets and installation problems belong elsewhere.
- Giving the first review away with no path to paid work. A free review is fine as a pilot. But every review should end with a clear next step the client can pay for.
- Building it on manual processes that won’t scale. Spreadsheets get you through the pilot. They won’t get you through a hundred clients with staggered renewal dates.
Where AppVentory fits
The hardest part of this plan is the manual work: finding every app, tracking every renewal, and turning raw spend data into something a client will read.
AppVentory handles that with one agent. It maps each client’s apps and spend, keeps renewals in view, and generates client-ready reports, from a Preliminary Financial Assessment to open the conversation through to a Comprehensive Financial Review and a Systems Review for deeper engagements. Portfolio Intelligence surfaces the recommendations worth raising across your client base. Recharge lets you manage client software billing and add a margin line without adding headcount.
The result: your team spends its time on the advisory conversation, not on assembling the evidence for it.
Ready to launch your app advisory line? [Book a demo] to see how AppVentory supports every stage of the 90-day plan.
