Tax Advisory and Client Advisory Lead

About the Company

DRDA is responsible for owning the client-facing advisory relationship from discovery through ongoing advisory. This role builds trust, understands the client’s business and personal objectives, translates complex tax advisory concepts into clear business decisions, and creates a client experience that leads to confidence, retention, and referrals. This is not a transactional tax role. The role requires strong consultative presence, executive communication, business-owner empathy, and the ability to guide clients through ambiguity, risk, competing priorities, and implementation resistance. The TAS Client Advisory Lead partners closely with technical tax strategy and implementation resources to ensure clients experience DRDA as coordinated, confident, and accountable.

About the Role

The TAS Client Advisory Lead is responsible for owning the client-facing advisory relationship from discovery through ongoing advisory.

Responsibilities

• Client Discovery and Relationship Ownership
• Build trust and credibility with prospective and existing TAS clients.
• Lead or support discovery conversations to understand the client’s business goals, pain points, family context, ownership structure, advisor relationships, and future direction.
• Identify client concerns, resistance, emotional drivers, decision dynamics, and unstated needs.
• Maintain relationship continuity across discovery, journey meetings, client presentation, implementation, ongoing advisory, and referral development.

• Advisory Communication
• Present preliminary strategy concepts in a way clients can understand and act on.
• Translate complex tax, business, financial and implementation issues into clear business-owner speak.
• Explain recommendations, risks, timing, tradeoffs, and next steps in a way the client understands and can relate to.
• Adapt communication style based on client personality, room dynamics, emotional tone, and level of sophistication of client.

• Client Presentation and Decision Support
• Participate in client strategy presentations and help frame recommendations around client priorities.
• Ensure clients understand the value, purpose, and business impact of tax recommendations.
• Read room dynamics and adjust messaging to maintain confidence, clarity, and trust.
• Support difficult conversations involving delays, confusion, technical limits, risk, or implementation challenges.

• Ongoing Advisory and Referral Development
• Maintain client confidence over time through consistent communication and follow-through.
• Review implementation progress, remaining gaps, savings achieved, strategic impact, and emerging risks.
• Identify new advisory opportunities based on changes in the client’s business, family, advisors, ownership goals, or operating environment.
• Create an advisory experience that clients are willing to recommend to peers and referral sources.

• Internal Collaboration
• Coordinate with tax technical resources (including CPAs), business coaches, accounting services such as bookkeepers, attorneys, financial advisors, and other specialists as needed.
• Ensure client priorities are understood internally and reflected in technical design and implementation planning.
• Escalate relationship, communication, technical, or risk issues appropriately.
• Help internal stakeholders stay aligned around client expectations, commitments, and decision drivers.

Qualifications

• Experience in an advisory role that plays the primary role leading the client.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate with business owner clients and external advisors.
• Lead a client relationship.
• Lead a client meeting.
• Must be able to present with confidence in front of a dynamic and diverse audience of executives and business owners.
• Strong ability to simplify complex issues and guide clients through decisions.
• Working knowledge of business concepts including finance, tax concepts and different common advisory roles. If you’ve read this far, please mention “red balloon” to your first interviewer for extra credit because we know you actually read the job description.
• Experience managing sensitive client conversations, leading amongst competing stakeholder priorities, and building high-trust advisory relationships.

Preferred Skills

• Experience as a business owner that is sufficiently large to support your lifestyle needs. The ideal candidate tried to start and operate a business, or operated it for a while successfully, and now wants to join and join a team in an established firm.
• Bachelor’s degree in a non-finance, non-law, non-accounting discipline with at least a 3.0 GPA. We will ask about this if it is not on your resume.
• At least 5 years working experience in professional services.
• At least 2 years of working experience in a business with less than 10 people.
• Familiarity with tax strategies and firsthand experience with tax strategy implementation. We will ask technical questions about this in the interview.
• Experience supporting referral development, client retention, and business growth.

Expected Outcomes

• Clients understand and trust DRDA recommendations for their business and family.
• Discovery information is complete, accurate, and useful for technical design.
• Client meetings create confidence rather than confusion.
• Clients have a sense of drive and action (no armchair quarterbacks allowed).
• Client concerns are surfaced and addressed early and professionally.
• Internal DRDA teams understand the client’s business priorities and decision drivers.
• Clients remain engaged through implementation and ongoing advisory.
• Generate repeat work and referrals (internally and externally) through a differentiated advisory experience.

Work Environment and Physical Requirements

This is a high growth and dynamic environment. Our client base is well established with high expectations. Our execution processes, methods, and tools are still in development (CMMI Level 2). We are seeking individuals that thrive in that kind of environment and want to contribute across multiple disciplines to the order, predictability, and team environment we are building. Non-doers need not apply. Remote or office or both. We like real people and will encourage you to be physically present and get connected with the rest of the team.