In the first part of this article, business development expert Rob Brown and Australian accountancy thought leader Trent McLaren. discussed how accountants need to focus on winning new business. Now, in the second part of the interview, they turn their attention to hiring and training.
Rob, who will be a keynote speaker at Accountex 2018, asked Trent: “Do you think there should be any change in the hiring policy for accounting firms, if they want to grow? Because we know that there are technically good accountants all over the place. But accountants who have that stuff, plus the ability to win work, they’re gold, aren’t they?”
Trent, who’s the head of accounting at Practice Ignition, says: “Well, they are gold. I think there’s a real shift. I know, we’re talking about it a lot in Australia, but we find a lot of graduates coming out of university aren’t equipped to use all the technology that we’re talking about.”
What should we be teaching?
Trent sees this as a potential problem. “None of the universities and education systems have quite caught on,” he says. “Who knows what they should be teaching? Because there’s nearly, what, 1,000 different accounting applications in the market. How does an education system know which ones it should be teaching?”
“So there’s a whole big shift that needs to happen, just from educating grads coming in.” He reckons accountants with coding skills and any type of IT wizardry will be hot preoperty. “Those people are fantastic,” he says.
“Some of the best progressive firms I’ve seen have got a dedicated developer that works in-house, in the accounting firm. They will actually build the integrations from their cloud accounting software, into the applications they use during the day. It could be a point of sale, might be the website or whatever. tThey’re helping their clients accurately get that data into their accounting system seamlessly, without having to import and export.”
The non-financial matrix
“So, not only the tracking all of the financials accurately, more efficiently, automatically, they’re also then starting to help them track any other type of number, the non-financial matrix that they should be tracking, to help them with their conversions of sales, and all those types of wonderful things.”
Rob says: “I thought you were going to say, ‘Plus the technical skills, they need the people skills’, but you’ve gone the other way and said, ‘We need technically good accountants that are also pretty good geeks’.”
Trent adds: “Yeah. I would lean to it, because it’s pretty easy to find to people that are … I think it’s relatively easy to find people who can speak well with clients. So if I wanted to set up a client facing team, or account managing team, or whatever, they’re my communicators, but the people that are going to be extremely important to me are the ones that can seamlessly optimise all the work that’s going on in those client falls with the technology, and that’s the biggest gap.
“If you go to all the firms and say, ‘Okay, who’s responsible for all the tech going on in here?’, you’re pointing to Bob, who’s been around for 20 years, who still loves his server in the back of the office, running on desktop practice management, Sage, or Iris, or whatever it may be. You don’t wait till Bob retires, before you’re actually how you progress anything technology-wise in your firm…
“So, get an IT-based developer that has a background in accounting, or whatever it may be, into your firm, and ask them to do the same task, whatever it is, and they will find an extremely creative way of getting that data into your ledger.”
Watch out for Part 3 of this fascinating conversation between Rob and Trent. Coming soon!.
If you would like to listen to the full conversation click here. Or watch a video of the exchange here.