My journey to Building Better Futures

At a meeting earlier this week I spoke about my journey from boring accountant to ....an older and just as boring accountant.

However, the road traveled has been interesting. I qualified as a chartered accountant in 1981. We had just about moved on from using abacuses, with calculators a welcome addition to our toolkit. In those days hand written records were the norm, excel spreadsheets were cutting edge and accounts preparation packages and cloud accounting unimaginable.

I started my own practice on a part time basis and then joined Wood & Disney, with Philip Wood, based in Wivenhoe, in 1987. In 1992 the recession caused chaos and I lost many of my clients and I kept thinking whether could I have done more for them? In those days the function of an accountant was to churn through the client's figures, produce a set of accounts and tell them how much tax they owed. Most clients paid their tax and filed their accounts, until the process repeated the following year. They rarely used the information given to them as they largely didn't understand what it meant to their business or how they could use the data to help their business grow. I saw an opportunity to add meaning to my role as an accountant by helping my clients understand how important their financial data is to their business and how they could use it to develop and grow their business. Business advice from your accountant; a bit of a novelty in the early 90's.

In the 90's, I bought a management consultancy system from the USA and rewrote it for the English market.  I designed and automated a system that took the business finance function and viewed it as an integral part of the whole business interdependent on HR, production, development, sales etc... Technology was starting to evolve. The internet hadn't taken off but I wrote it in an Access database so I could automate some of the responses. I renamed it Question Master. I then created an analytical system which could analyse accounts and create "what if" scenarios. I called this Troubleshooter Plus and again it was written within an Access database.

As a result of my promotion of business advisory services I was invited to the USA to attend a conference of The Institute of Profit Advisors which subsequently was brought to the UK and I qualified as a Certified Profit Consultant. Around this time I also took a certification with the ACCA to become a Business Navigator.

In early 2002 I launched the first ever interactive business advice website, Plus4Business which flopped spectacularly and I still have the two IBM servers as mementos. The system was web based, designed to be fully automated. I initially blamed its failure on a lack of broadband but in reality clients wanted face to face advice not rely on generic explanations generated by a program.

An important life lesson was learnt. Don't be afraid of taking risks and failure - just learn from your mistakes and try not to repeat them!

Plus4Business may have been a commercial failure but I learnt so much from the process of designing the system and setting it up. It formed the foundation of the finance combined with advice, that we now offer to all our clients. It also demonstrated the importance of a structured advice approach that looks at a business as a complete entity with all functions of a business interdependent and finance at the heart, rather than a piecemeal, firefighting approach.

In 2003, we started the transition to a paperless office, moving all the administration and systems in our office firstly onto our own servers and eventually into the cloud. We got ahead of our competitors by learning when the technology was in its infancy, about the different software systems and later, cloud based systems. We also incurred all the costs at an early stage, with a steep learning curve, investing in technology and setting up systems and processes .

In 2008 we first started to introduce cloud accounting to our clients. Initially with Kashflow, closely followed by Xero and QuickBooks on-line. This has made advising our clients far easier as we had access to their real time information. It changed the way we looked at bookkeeping from a monthly task to a daily task. It means that the advise we give is no longer based on historical data and we can be proactive instead of reactive.

In 2020, this investment gave us an enormous advantage when covid hit. All our systems and processes were set up to work remotely as were nearly all of our clients'. Our work output didn't falter, as we all worked from home in exactly the same way as we would in the office. We were able to focus on helping and advising clients at their time of greatest need for advice and reassurance. We embraced Zoom and Microsoft Teams, having virtual face to face meetings with all our clients. We're now back to in person meetings but still use virtual meetings to catch up with our own team daily as we've adopted blended working as the best of both worlds, home and office.

My research and experience led to our current human led advisory process called "Your Journey To Freedom". And a few spin off programs called "The Strategic Cash Retention Program" and "The NAG Index".

And of course last year we launched www.thefutureproofbusiness.co.uk. This is a free assessment to help businesses improve their chances of surviving into the long term. For six minutes of your time completing the assessment, we give you a free 12 page report. All part of my desire to reduce the failure rate of businesses in the UK which has been appalling over quite a long time.

I've learnt over the years that the destination may not be where you originally thought it would be. Life is always throwing you curved balls. Technology evolves, the economic environment changes, you meet new people, you gain new experiences and learn new things. Last month my 21 year old, youngest son, showed me NFC-enabled tags. I learnt how to program them and used them at an exhibition to automatically direct visitors with NFC enabled devices direct to our website. There's always something new to learn - that's what makes the journey so fresh, exciting and rewarding!

As you move through your career your perspective on the past and future changes. For me, building for the future has become the focus. Not just building for my own future, but helping clients build better futures for themselves and for the next generation. I suppose it's all about leaving a legacy or in your own small way being useful, not just for your own benefit but also for others. So my professional focus is about giving advice to clients to help them future proof their businesses and pass on some of the hard earned knowledge and experience I've gained from being in business for over 40 years.

So, don't be put off by the journey. You may not get to your original destination but maybe somewhere a lot better and have a great deal of fun and experiences along the way. I still continue to learn, get new ideas and move our business forward. I'm still on that journey and suspect it will never be truly "finished" but that's the fun of doing this.

Anyway the journey will continue.