Humanise The Numbers - for ambitious accountants in practice

Would you, as a leader or manager of an accounting firm, sit up and listen to the UK General Manager of a corporate business and how they’ve interacted with the accounting firms serving them?  In this humanisethenumbers.online podcast, you'll meet a qualified accountant and experienced General Manager of a UK corporation and hear her interpretation of the relationships between business owner,...

What is it that you and your firm have to do to make the shift from compliance only to compliance plus advisory , where advisory is generating significant high-value fees from work that you enjoy and which, by the way, your team enjoy as well?  In this HumaniseTheNumbers.online podcast discussion with Joe Sole of the 8-person firm Sole Associates, you will hear Joe unpack some of the detail, not j...

There’s no doubting the quality and strength and depth of the relationships you have with your best business-owner clients.  But someone will pip the quality of those relationships when they get involved in discussing, planning and executing the sale of your clients’ businesses. On this humanisethenumbers.online podcast discussion, you’ll hear from Andy Denny and Liz Jackson – both directors at an...

How do you set work and life boundaries, not just for yourself, but for your team as well, so that they are fully engaged, enthusiastic and driven to bringing success to you, your firm, your clients?  And it’s not just about those boundaries. Advisory is becoming more important, more relevant, more valuable to your clients, so how do you move your firm forward in the volatile and complex world in...

How do you and your firm win younger, dynamic clients with a long lifetime value (because of their age), if you are able to do a brilliant job of looking after their businesses?  As a firm, you and your client portfolio have almost certainly got clients who started young with a small business and then grew them into substantial businesses. So, how do you tap into that younger audience?  In this po...

If there are two things that ultimately, fundamentally influence the success of your accounting firm, it's your firm's ability to retain and recruit the right people and build your team and to recruit and retain the right clients.  So, it was a real pleasure to welcome Andrew Jordan of Connect 4 onto a podcast discussion where we actually unpacked, thanks to Andrew's experiences at...

How does an accountancy firm’s leadership team – the whole team – radically change the use of software, processes and systems within their firm? That’s a big question to unpack, but in this humanisethenumbers.online podcast discussion between myself and Eriona Bajrakurtaj, you'll hear how she has transformed the behaviour and performance of the people, as well as the effectiveness of the syst...

It can often feel like pushing water uphill when it comes to getting your team to embrace the necessary changes to secure the future success of your firm. In our 20 years of working with accountancy firms, we’ve experienced this more often than not. However, there are ways and means, techniques and processes that you can use to help your team want to change, to embrace change, so that it’s your te...

It's clear from our conversations with virtually every firm with which we work that recruiting high-quality team members, though it's always been tough, is now tougher than ever before. Those same firms are also looking for ways to work better with their individual employees, within their teams and across the firm as well. In this podcast, you're going to hear from Elaine Godley. I&...

On this HumaniseTheNumbers podcast, you’ll hear from David Gilroy – entrepreneur, business owner, marketeer and, more specifically, website expert.  However, David doesn't work within or provide for the accountancy profession. He builds websites (now over 400 websites) for the legal profession, for lawyers and solicitors. But David’s attention to detail, his obsession with the numbers that re...

Occasionally, on our HumaniseTheNumbers podcasts, we're privileged to welcome a guest who has deep, personal experience in a profoundly important aspect of business that is directly relevant to you, your firm and your clients. With John Warrillow, we've got that, plus we've got his extensive research into how to successfully sell a business.  He's the author of three books – Bu...

It can often feel like a particularly growly challenge to work out how to successfully promote and market your accountancy firm. So it pays, don't you think, to listen in to a marketing expert. In this podcast, you'll hear from Zoe Paradine, Head of Marketing in the UK for UHY Hacker Young. Zoe shares her experience of 20 years of marketing for her own firm and, more importantly, her ins...

How do you create, build and nurture a high-growth accountancy firm? In this podcast discussion with the head of DJH Mitten Clarke, Scott Heath, you'll hear him share a number of detailed insights into how he’s developed his high-growth firm, a firm that’s gone from 30 to 70 people and, in the last two years or so, from 70 to 275 people, in four offices.  But what stands out most from this di...

How you and your firm deliver great value to your clients is a common theme in the HumaniseTheNumbers podcast series.  In this discussion with Phil Hobden, now of Wolters Kluwer, I was able to unpack Phil's experiences as a business owner, as well as an employee and leader of education at Capitalise and, previously, at Futrli.  He shares some amazing insights. The discussion twisted and turne...

How would it feel if you and your team in your accountancy firm were able to get to January and feel completely calm, completely relaxed and completely in control around the number of tax returns you've got to do? Well on this Humanise The Numbers podcast discussion with George from Pinfields in the West Midlands, you'll hear Georgina, George, share some deep, practical and relatively si...

How do you and your managers hold accountability conversations that work really well? By really well, I mean that they work out for both the manager and for the person they’re working with – holding them to account. Never an easy conversation. On this podcast with Graeme Tennick, you'll hear Graeme share his commitment to his own accountability, as well as how open and transparent he is with...

There are very few people who are recognized within the accounting profession, worldwide, us, UK, Europe, Australasia. Paul Dunn is one of those individuals, he has served the accounting profession for several decades, CEO of B1G1 - Business for Good and he's won several awards. On this podcast discussion, Paul shares his insights on the value of purpose and the value of values so that you ca...

How do you as a leader or manager of an accounting firm connect in a deeper, more meaningful way with your team? How do you ensure that this connection has a positive impact on the way in which team members behave and on their motivation, their drive and their willingness to see your firm succeed? How will this influence the amount and quality of the work they do and the level of care they show fo...

How do you stay ahead of the game? This is a bit of a generic question, but more specifically, how do you continue to stay ahead of your clients’ expectations? What are they expecting from you, your team and your firm, and how do you stay ahead of that, so that you can constantly deliver value, as well as a magical, rather than miserable, experience to your clients? Well, on this HumaniseTheNumber...

How does your accountancy firm earn the right to achieve and be comfortable with prices that are three, four, five times or more higher than you would normally charge a typical client?  In this podcast, which was a great pleasure and privilege to make, we have Ron Baker discussing pricing, the subscription model, niche marketing and positioning, strategy and purpose. I hope you'll take the ti...

Occasionally I struggle to work out how best to help an accountant or an accountancy firm connect with the real value that they deliver to their clients, especially their business-owner clients. In this podcast discussion with Stephen Pell, you'll hear Stephen and I unpack the emotional part of the value equation, drawing on Stephen’s knowledge and expertise in his work with music artists. St...

Don't you think it pays to have a clear picture about what your firm will look like in the future, say, in five years’ time? Your firm of the future?  In this podcast discussion with Sian Lloyd and Rebecca Johnson from the Cardiff-based firm Lewis Ballard, you'll hear them share how they’ve created a future-focused, advisory-focused, genuinely caring approach to running an accountancy pr...

What must it be like to spend 21 years in a firm of accountants, going through the ranks, then deciding to leave and join a technology company? In this podcast discussion with Paul Lodder of Dext, Paul shares some amazingly valuable insights into his experiences, both in the accounting firm and at Dext, insights which I believe can profoundly influence the way you install and implement technology...

How do you transform your firm’s accounts production workflow so that you free up people's time whilst simultaneously building stronger, more meaningful, more valuable relationships with your clients?  In this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Vipul Sheth of AdvanceTrack Outsourcing, you'll hear Vipul share insights from the many dozens of firms with which he and his team work, specifica...

It strikes me that one of the most valuable conversations you can have with a business-owner client concerns the exit from their business. When are they going to close it or sell it? How much do they want for it? And how much personally do they want to extract from the business as a result of that? A highly valuable conversation, but one with which many accountants are not entirely comfortable. Jo...