I’ve sat where you’re sitting.
Forty-five years as a chartered accountant and a partner in both small and mid-tier firms. I’ve lived the partner dynamics, the growth that outgrew the systems, the question of who runs the place next. I’m not a consultant explaining your world back to you from the outside – I’ve worked inside it, and I got things wrong before I worked out what actually moves a firm.
What I do now is simple to say: I work with accounting firms to remove the bottlenecks holding back performance. The plan that won’t move, the managers who won’t step up, the growth that’s stalled, the partners who can’t agree where they’re headed — these are rarely a problem of competence or effort. They’re almost always a bottleneck nobody inside the firm can see or clear. That’s what I’m called in for.
What makes us different?
I don’t arrive with a solution. I bring the conversation that lets your own people find one.
That sounds like a small distinction. It’s the whole thing. The firms who come to me have usually already tried the obvious fixes – the strategy day, the new hire, the accountability drive, the advisory package – and watched it fail. It failed because the answer was never going to come from outside. Your people already hold it; what’s been missing is the conversation that gets it out, and the structure that turns it into progress.
So:
I don’t prescribe. I help you see what’s actually in the way, and I help your people work out what to do about it. The thinking stays yours – which is why it holds after I’ve gone.
I turn plans into progress. Using 90-day cycles that produce real, visible movement each quarter, rather than a plan that gets signed and gathers dust.
I leave you more capable than I found you. Not because I run a training course, but because your people spend the engagement having the conversations that were missing – and they keep having them once I’ve left.
That’s the work: taking a complex, stuck situation and creating the conversation that cuts through to what matters. Nothing much happens without one.
You’ve got the meetings already in the diary. Let’s talk about the conversations you’re going to have in them.