Strategy as a rhythm, not a one-off exercise.

Why accountancy and advisory firms can no longer rely on a strategy process that starts from scratch every five years.

A white paper by Chris Jansen, senior strategist Jester Strategy

The strategy document that is already outdated at the moment of adoption

It is a familiar moment in every mid-sized accountancy and advisory firm. A strategy is, after a process of almost a year with an external facilitator, a series of partner days and a few surveys, finally adopted. The document lies on the table. It contains a fine objective, a healthy growth target, a few strategic pillars and a direction for the coming five years. The partners nod. The marketing department can finally get to work on the positioning. And in the corridors a wry feeling emerges that part of what is in it is already overtaken.

Familiar feeling? In the past three years more has changed in the accountancy and finance advisory landscape than in the ten years before. Generative AI now does work that used to be reserved for juniors. Foreign capital providers (often private equity) have bought up a large part of the Dutch mid-tier. The workforce is ageing, while young professionals have different expectations of work than they did ten years ago. And the client is asking for a type of advice and a rhythm of working that the traditional annual-accounts model no longer serves as a matter of course.

Anyone who reviews their strategy once every five years in this environment is steering on a world view that was already in the past during the meeting itself. The challenge is not that the strategy has been drawn up wrongly. The challenge is that the strategy process itself no longer fits the pace of the outside world. What the sector needs is not the next strategy session. It is a different mechanism: a rolling strategy in which the strategic conversation is not an event but a rhythm.

Three forces dictating the pace

To understand why the classic five-year cycle has been overtaken, it helps to lay alongside each other the three forces converging on the sector. None of the three is new. What is new is that they are accelerating simultaneously and reinforcing one another.

The first is AI. Generative AI is no longer a distant promise in accountancy and advisory work; it is today concretely automating compilation work, preparatory audit procedures, standardised tax advice and the first phases of due diligence. The most disruptive effect lies not in which tasks disappear, but in what that does to the price and pyramid structure of a firm. The biggest shock is not in the rates of juniors, but in the disappearance of the work on which their role traditionally rested. Tasks that teams used to spend days on (preparing documents, making analyses, checking files, drafting first concepts) can increasingly be performed with a single prompt, workflow or software check. With that, the bottom of the pyramid comes under pressure. The standard work of juniors with which they made hours, learned and became billable is rapidly diminishing. The earnings model is therefore shifting from making hours to delivering value: sharp judgement, domain knowledge, client context and the ability to deploy technology effectively.

The second is consolidation. The Dutch mid-tier landscape has been quietly redrawn. International networks are actively taking over Dutch firms, often financed from funds with a return horizon of a few years. For the firms taken over, this means a new owner with new targets and often a different culture. For the firms that remain independent, it means a competitive landscape substantially different from five years ago (different competitors, different price points, different propositions). Mapping an independent strategy in a market consolidating under your feet calls for a continuously updated picture of who is taking over what and when. Information impossible to capture in a five-year plan.

The third is the rise of private equity as a client category. The PE portfolio has grown over ten years into a substantial share of revenue for many mid-tier firms. PE clients bring their own rhythms. PE ownership usually has a holding period of three to five years, with a clear beginning (the acquisition, with due diligence), a middle (value creation, with management information and growth plans) and an end (the exit, with vendor due diligence and SPA negotiations). The question to the adviser is different at each of those moments, and the timing is set by the PE owner, not by the financial-year cycle. Firms that still plan their capacity and services on the traditional annual cycle therefore lag the demand of these clients. And in a market where PE revenue often makes the margin, that is a serious strategic problem.

The strength of these three developments is not that each one alone is large. It is that they accelerate simultaneously and let the rhythm of the classic strategy cycle collapse.

Why the five-year cycle has been overtaken

The five-year strategy is no accident. It is a logical product of a time when the external environment was relatively stable, when major shifts unfolded over years rather than months, and when a good strategy document could indeed last five years. In professional services this cycle worked perfectly well for years.

What does not change is the need for long-term thinking. It is still there, and it is perhaps greater than ever. What changes is the assumption that a strategic compass is set once and then remains usable for years. Three patterns make that assumption problematic.

The environment changes faster than the cycle. A strategy adopted in January can be overtaken by three major developments by August: a new AI tool affecting a whole service line, an acquisition of a local competitor by an international party, a regulatory change shifting an advisory practice fundamentally. In the classic cycle, those are three occasions when it is said: "we will pick it up in the next strategy round". By the time that round comes, four years later, ten more similar developments will have occurred.

The assumptions on which the strategy rests erode gradually. A strategy is always built on a set of assumptions about the market, the client, the competition and one's own organisation. If those assumptions erode faster than the cycle allows, you implement a strategy whose foundation has already shifted. The problem is that erosion is rarely visible in one moment; it happens in a hundred small signals that only become visible if you systematically collect and discuss them.

The organisation does not learn from its own actions. In a classic five-year cycle the strategy is evaluated at the end. What went well, what did not, what we would do differently. But by that time the learning moment lies four years behind the events. A tender lost in year two is no longer sharply remembered. The factual reasons why a new proposition did not land have remained unspoken. The knowledge is there, but never brought back to the strategic conversation. With that, the organisation misses its own learning curve.

It is tempting to respond to this with "then we will review the strategy every year". That helps somewhat, but does not solve the core problem. Because the problem is not the frequency of the evaluation. The problem is that the evaluation is still an event, not a rhythm. And an event, however well facilitated, is too slow for the reality in which an accountancy and advisory firm operates.

Strategy as rhythm: two coupled cycles

Rolling strategy is therefore not doing-the-same-thing-more-often. It is a different ordering: instead of one big strategy process every few years, two continuous cycles that feed each other. A short, fast cycle on the performance of the organisation. And a slow, fundamental cycle on the validity of the strategy itself. Both run continuously, both inform each other.

It is an ordering we at Jester Strategy call the strategic control lemniscate: a figure of two touching cycles, introduced by Breunesse and De Vries. The lower cycle is about performance: how are we doing relative to what we had set out to do? Which targets are we meeting, which not? What does the variance analysis on the budget and on our other steering instruments say? This cycle runs at a pace of weeks and months via, for example, quarterly reports, monthly closings and progress meetings. The upper cycle is about strategic validity: do our assumptions about the market, the client and the competition still hold? Which trends, incidents, new players call for a revision of our direction? This cycle runs at a different pace: quarterly reflections, semi-annual strategy updates, an annual fundamental recalibration.

The strength lies in the coupling. Whoever steers only on the lower cycle optimises within a strategy that may no longer hold. Whoever steers only on the upper cycle carries out endless market analyses without them landing in execution. What connects the two is the conversation in which signals from performance return in the strategic conversation, and in which new strategic insights are translated into execution. That conversation has a fixed place in the organisation's agenda.

For accountancy and advisory firms this is a shift that is more than cosmetic. It touches on how the partner meeting organises its agenda, how the managing partner structures their month, how the management team plans its yearly diary. Strategy shifts from something to which you occasionally devote a session to something you are continuously engaged with.

Looking far and learning from the small

What a rolling strategy demands in practice is an organisation that can look at two distances at once. An ability that in many firms is present in only one form.

Looking far means systematically exploring the external environment: the broader developments that will redefine the market in two to five years. Which AI tools are in the pipeline of the major software providers? Which firms are in conversation with which capital providers? What is the regulator doing, in The Hague and in Brussels? Which type of companies is growing fastest in the Dutch economy, and what do they want from their adviser? This looking-far should be routine. In firms strong at this, someone is explicitly responsible for keeping this picture up to date, and there is a fixed moment per quarter when that picture is shared and discussed.

Learning from the small means the other end: the weekly and monthly signals from the work itself. A lost tender, and the real reason why. A new question from a PE buyer that does not fit the existing proposition offering. A failed hire that says something about positioning in the labour market. These signals sit in the daily stream of the firm; everyone sees them, no one structurally brings them together. A learning organisation has a mechanism to gather these small observations, bundle them, and put them into the strategic conversation.

Neither capability is new, and neither is particularly complicated. What rarely goes well is the combination. Firms that look far without learning from the small get fine trend presentations that do not land in execution. Firms that learn from the small without looking far optimise tactically while the market shifts under their feet. A rolling strategy connects these two. Anyone who looks honestly at their organisation usually sees that one of the two is fundamentally immature.

Three design choices for the firm that wants to keep up

A rolling strategy is not a tool and not a working format. It is an ordering of the organisation with three design choices that are, in our experience, decisive.

The first is that strategy gets a fixed place in the steering rhythm, not just in the strategy plan. Concretely this means that the partner meeting or the directors have a standing agenda component that structurally deals with signals from the outside world and the validity of the strategic assumptions. In firms where this works well, that moment is prepared by someone with an explicit strategy or market-intelligence mandate, and the outcome is always translated into one of three responses: continue with the current course, refine the course, or fundamentally revise the course. In short, an explicit choice.

The second is that the organisation learns to take small signals seriously. This sounds self-evident, but runs against the culture of most accountancy and advisory firms. The culture is geared to closing off, to delivering, to the next client. Taking time to reflect on a lost tender or a failed proposal process feels like a luxury. A rolling strategy requires building a mechanism, sometimes as simple as a standard format after every won or lost tender, or a quarterly reflection with the sales teams, through which these observations are gathered and shared. The most important thing is not the technique, but the discipline to really do it structurally.

The third is that looking far gets an owner. In most mid-tier firms long-term exploration is the informal responsibility of everyone, and therefore in practice of no one. A rolling strategy requires one person or a small team to be explicitly responsible for maintaining the external picture: market trends, competitor moves, client developments, regulation, and actively bringing that picture into the strategic conversation. That does not have to be a full-time function; it is an explicit role. Whoever does not appoint an owner here remains dependent on the chance attentiveness of whoever happens to be at the table that week.

Three questions for the partner meeting

For anyone with the familiar feeling that their own strategy process is no longer keeping up with the pace of the market, there are three questions that quickly make the conversation concrete.

One: when did we last revise a strategic assumption on the basis of what happened in the past three months? Not the whole strategy; one assumption. An assumption about a service line vulnerable to AI. An assumption about a client segment developing differently than foreseen. If the answer is that this only happens during the strategy session, then the cycle is too long for the reality in which we work.

Two: do we as a partner group know which three developments could change our sector most fundamentally in the coming eighteen months? And do we have a shared picture of what our response to that could be? The answer does not have to be worked out; the picture has to be there. If those developments are not in view, or if the partners think fundamentally differently about them without that being spoken, then that is the most important work waiting in the coming quarters.

Three: how do we as an organisation learn from the tenders we have lost, the clients who have left, the hires that have failed, and does that learning come back into the strategic conversation? Or does it remain stuck in informal conversations in the corridor and stray comments in a management team meeting? An organisation that does not learn from its own actions executes its strategy in the dark.

Strategy as rhythm instead of as event: it sounds simple, but for many firms it is a substantial shift. It calls for a different agenda, a different division of roles and, above all, a different conversation. The gain lies in the ability to see earlier what is changing, to learn more quickly from what is happening and to make choices about direction, investment and positioning more timely. With this, strategy becomes a distinctive capability. Responding more quickly to a changing market. Investing earlier in propositions clients will ask for. Choosing more sharply which client groups, services and talents do and do not fit the firm's future. The strategy process then helps to continuously determine whether the chosen direction still holds. In this way a firm determines its direction independently, or only comes into motion when the room to choose has already shrunk.

About the author

Chris Jansen is a senior strategist at Jester Strategy. He guides directors and partner groups in professional services, including accountancy, finance advisory and consultancy, on strategic reorientation and on setting up rolling-strategy routines.

This white paper has been written on the basis of practical experience with strategic processes at Dutch accountancy and advisory firms. The cited strategic control lemniscate comes from Breunesse and De Vries (2011). The other insights are observations of the author and reflect the wider practice of Jester Strategy in this sector.