Relational Intelligence: Why Your Client Relationships Are Your Most Valuable Practice Asset
Are You Really As Present With Your Clients As You Think You Are?
Relational intelligence isn't a soft skill. For professional practices, it's the foundation of everything — client retention, succession value, and long-term growth.
I was in Darling Harbour recently for an event called Leader Shift. I'll be honest — leadership conferences can go either way. This one was worth every minute.
Two speakers in particular left me thinking long after I'd driven home. The first was Esther Perel — the Belgian psychotherapist who has spent decades studying how humans connect, and what it costs us when we don't. Her focus was on what she calls relational intelligence. The second was Ben Crowe, a mindset coach who works with elite athletes. His message was direct and rather uncomfortable: stop living for other people's expectations. He was a compelling speaker, and his book is worth your time.
But it was Perel's words that stayed with me. The quality of our relationships, she argued, determines the quality of everything else. And as I sat there, I kept thinking about how directly that applies to every professional practice I've worked with over the past forty years.
"The quality of our relationships determines the quality of everything else — our practices, our succession outcomes, our lives."
The Email That Outperformed Every Mailchimp Campaign
Not long before Leader Shift, I sent a short personal note to a handful of practitioners I know — nothing elaborate, just a message asking if anyone wanted to catch up. The response was extraordinary. Far better than any campaign I'd sent through Mailchimp in recent memory. People replied within the hour. Meetings were booked. Real conversations happened.
It was such a simple thing. And yet it reminded me of what we so often forget when we're busy managing practices, lodgement lists and staff reviews. People want to hear from you. Not your marketing platform. Not a beautifully designed newsletter. You.
Relational Intelligence Is Not a Soft Skill
I think the professions have long treated relationship-building as the nice-to-have component of practice life — something you do when you have time, after the real work is done. Perel's argument, and my own experience, is that this gets it exactly backwards.
In our profession, relationships are the real work. Every valuation, every transaction, every benchmarking conversation at Rob Knights & Co ultimately rests on the trust between us and another person. And that trust is not built through a client portal or an automated check-in sequence. It is built through years of showing up — returning calls promptly, visiting clients at their premises, remembering what matters to them beyond the annual return.
When we value a practice for sale, one of the most telling indicators of what it's worth is the depth of its client relationships. Firms where the principal is genuinely known and trusted by their clients — not just their largest clients, but broadly across the book — consistently achieve better outcomes at transaction time. That relational equity has real dollar value. It is not intangible. It shows up in client retention, in clawback results, and in the price a purchaser is willing to pay.
Are You Actually Present, or Just Available?
There's a difference between being available to clients and being genuinely present with them. Available means they can reach you. Present means they feel that you know them, that you're across their situation, that you're thinking about them between the annual tax return and the quarterly BAS.
The fastest-growing firms I observe are not always the ones with the most sophisticated technology or the slickest client portal. They are the ones where the principals are proactively visiting clients at their premises, having conversations that go beyond compliance, and coming back to the office with work that the client didn't know they needed until they had the conversation. That's relational intelligence in practice.
Ben Crowe's message about stopping living for other people's expectations landed differently once I sat with it alongside Perel's ideas. Because part of what holds practitioners back from genuinely investing in client relationships is exactly that — the pressure of expectations. The lodgement deadlines, the staff reviews, the ATO correspondence. The feeling that real relationship-building is a luxury for when the urgent work is done.
It isn't a luxury. It's the work. And the practices that understand that are the ones I'd back to be thriving in ten years' time.
Want to understand what your client relationships are really worth — and how to strengthen them before your next succession event?
Michelle Knights — Principal, Rob Knights & CoWhat practices are selling for, and what is moving the numbers
Michelle’s monthly note on practice valuations, buyer activity and the conditions we are seeing across accounting, financial planning and legal firms.
