My lifestyle practice

Recently, I have been feeling a bit despondent about being an accountant.  What’s my future?  Is there any point in being an accountant?  Nearly everyone I know does accounting or bookkeeping and the competition to be your own boss is so much hard work.  It would be much easier to do something else but what?  And then how about the 10 years of work and study that I have already put in? I don’t want all that to go to waste.  When I was in India, I spoke to someone who said that accountants in India earn loads and are almost revered which didn’t help how I was feeling.

However, while I was there, I started reading the ‘The Go-to Expert’ by Heather Townsend & Jon Baker.  I’ve not finished it yet but that book made feel a bit more optimistic.  I don’t think I’ll ever go on tour talking about things so I skipped that bit but I do like writing, so maybe I can work on that while attempting to become an expert. Then I read these articles - https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/content/the-worlds-most-inspiring-accoun... which has also made me feel inspired to carry on doing what I am doing but get better at it and let my part time practice evolve at its own pace.

My practice has a few tax return clients and then family but it’s ok for now. Thing is, for most of my working life, I’ve worked in a practice and the thought of working for someone and doing bookkeeping and accounts from first records, over and over again fills me with dread.  I’ve started and ended two sub contracts that involved working in practice.  One of them, the work load got too much and for the other one, I just didn’t enjoy doing it.

The sub contract work that I still do is like doing the accounting function for a company and maybe this change in focus is why I like the work I’m doing, even though it might not seem so technically challenging. This gives me time to focus firstly, on my kids, secondly to be good at what I do for this company and finally on my practice and focus on the type of clients I want to have.  Well, I’m not sure what my focus on my practice is going to be at the moment – maybe properties or maybe yoga teachers since that seems to be the extent of my clients! Either way, reading these books and articles was enough to make me want to be an accountant again.