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Practice strategy: How to maintain fee growth

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1st Dec 2014
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Andrew Brookes recently passed his 29th year at Hazlewoods, a chartered accountancy firm in Cheltenham, and in just the last five years achieved 39% fee growth.

Brookes explained that it was about getting staff thinking strategically and offering a great environment with challenging work and no ceiling to progression.

"From 2009 to 2014 we delivered 39% fee growth for the period," he said. "That was due to the drive and commitment of the partners and the staff and our sector specialisation. You are nothing without your staff; you can have the best business model in the world but if you don’t have quality staff you will not achieve success."

"There are no barriers to progression. If people are good enough they will be able to get on," he added.

Brookes joined the firm from university and now leads a team of 30 working for clients in health and social care. Within this team, staff specialise in due diligence, corporate finance, audit accounts and tax.

"My focus is in dealing with clients and supporting the needs of my staff," he said. "I would say that my time is split fairly evenly between working in the office and time spent working out of the office. If I use yesterday as an example, I spent the day working in London. I saw three private equity houses and met with a prospective new client. In the evening I attended an awards dinner for the industry."

Hazlewoods focuses on five sectors: health and social care, veterinary, legal, dental and agriculture. 

Much of the work is in London, in partnership with mid-market private equity houses. 

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"The staff are our key asset," Brookes said. "If you walk into any of our offices you will not see pictures on the walls, instead around each of the buildings you will find photographs of the staff and the teams. The staff are the centre of everything we do and we do lots of different things for them.

Staff perks can include trips to watch comedians or even free ice cream.

In June the firm arranged for an ice cream van to turn up in every office car park. "It rained that day but the forecast was for nice weather," Brookes said. "Reception told the staff there was an ice cream for everybody."

The varied work at Hazlewoods and the attractions of Cheltenham are among the reasons for the firm's high staff retention rate, Brookes added.

"The firm is of a size where we are big enough to have a specialist in all the technical areas such as VAT, stamp duty, inheritance tax etc, but we are not so big that I don’t know who all of the staff are.

"Working with both big and small audit clients enabled me to understand the breadth of accounts and tax. In a similar way to now, I think our trainees are a well-rounded group of accountants because they are also able to gain that breadth of experience as I did."

Training staff and assessing their performance is also important.

"We talk regularly and staff have mentoring through the appraisal process where their career objectives and goals are set," Brookes said.

The formal appraisals are half yearly and there is a review form per assignment.

"Staff will have a review with their immediate boss. If you are a starting assistant you will have your review with the semi senior; if you are a semi senior your review with be with a senior; and if you are a senior you will have a review with a manager. Those assignment review forms will then form part of the half yearly review process."

Technology is another important part of work at the firm which has a document-management system and is a paperless office. It's considering using more cloud technology.

"We are currently assessing whether cloud is the right option for us in terms of certain functions. Cloud forms part of our disaster recovery system. Potentially the cloud could form part of our document management system in relation to a portal type approach which would allow us to share documents with clients."

Hazlewoods is also considering using Yammer software for internal communication - for example, sharing news and other information. 

"For example, there might be a news release or a legal ruling which affects the health care sector and so I am able to post it onto the health care group and everyone can see it," Brookes said. "As a firm we are constantly looking at moving our IT platform forwards."

For the full Andrew Brookes interview with Matt Evans, visit the Sift Talent website.

Would you like to work at Hazlewoods? Contact Sam Colclough or take a look at the roles Hazlewoods have available.

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By Discountants
01st Dec 2014 13:57

39% sounds impressive until you realise that it is just RPI +3% a year for the period concerned

Now 39% a year would be truly amazing.

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By ireallyshouldknowthisbut
02nd Dec 2014 17:46

Must admit that read to me as the HR manager things "boy we are waaaaaaay out there, such a great place to work, and its largely about me.  All the sales are down to us as we motivate them so hard."

The internal guy would probably say "Well its just like the other firms we have work for, same stuff different name on the door, we  have the same sort of routines, the same tiny little treats for staff as if we are 8 years old that HR seem to think are genius and we go along with (dont upset the HR guy!)   that sort of thing. Generally we just follow the same old pattern and have thrashed our sales a bit and grown just over inflation, use cloud stuff now we convinced the boss to stop being tight about it.  We explained how news groups worked too, but they still cant really understand that, but getting there - maybe when one of the big bosses goes on a course about ti he will come back and tell us "XXX in the new black" and we can have them too so we dont keep getting all those circular emails that dont realte to each department.   The only thing that REALLY freaks us all out is the team pics on the walls. They are so cringe-worthy. We think its some horrible US import. Staff call it the "corridor of shame" and try and avoid them.  Bring back the nice beaches and scenes I say. Even those lame motivation posters are better than this."

 

 

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