This firm of accountants in the North West had experienced a number of partnership changes. This resulted in a relatively inexperienced and divided management team.

The business therefore lacked any clear direction in terms of where it was heading and what it really was trying to achieve for its customers. What was clear was a desire from the new senior partner to make the business different from other accountancy firms.

Two of the “junior” partners had worked their way through the ranks of the old firm and therefore were struggling with the balance between doing their job, running the business and the difficulty of suddenly being a boss over staff who had previously been their superior.

This was potentially an organisational time bomb.

Oh, and in addition to all of this, the firm needed to increase revenues.

So, here’s what happened…

The partners agreed to spend two days with me on a strategic planning session. This is where the real transformation took place.

During the two days, the partners, with my help created a new vision for the business, detailing what they wanted it to be and in particular how they could sell it in a single strap line.

The team was now united

We also identified strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This was very enlightening. It took a lot of guts for the partners to be so honest with one another, probably for the first time since the partnership was formed.

At the end of the two days, there was a clear direction, tasks to be performed and, in particular, a complete understanding that each partner needed to be responsible for a specific area of the business e.g. marketing.

Each partner had to apply for one of these key roles, which was very interesting and worked out perfectly.

Now that we had united the partners, it was time to do the same with their staff.

A half day presentation was arranged, away from the business, in which each partner had a part to play and I also presented at this event.

Finally, we began developing the marketing and new business opportunities. I worked with the partners to offer strategic planning to their clients and to non-clients. Additionally, we created a number of seminars to begin the client education program and begin the process of selling other services.

Marketing was high on the agenda. We re-branded the business on a low budget to give it a more modern look and feel. We also re-wrote the website incorporating the new branding, and launched our first in-house marketing campaign aimed at selling insurance to clients. This was the most successful campaign they had run, out-pulling previous campaigns for this topic by 31%.

I was a guest presenter on a number of in-house mini-seminars the business ran. These were structured well and were very successful. At one of these events, a client approached me at the end of the evening to thank me for my presentation and to tell me that just one of my ideas had given them the opportunity to make an additional £60,000 net profit per annum. What a way to finish an evening!