Agility and flexibility in business is everything, and where advice is required, it needs to be from a source that is prepared to be equally innovative and proactive, two words not necessarily associated with the accountancy profession.
It was around 15 years ago when TC Group realised they needed to shift away from the fully compliance focused role of an accountancy practice and move more into the advisory and consultancy space.
While this approach began when they were trading as Haines Watts, the firm’s continued growth and expansion saw it become Fortus in 2020, before merging with UK- wide TC Group, the fastest-growing Top 25 Accountancy Age firm, in July last year, and the approach has continued.
The firm has strong roots locally, having had an office in Northampton since 1986 and an office in Milton Keynes since 2020.
Valuable expertise with personal chemistry
Through a suite of specialist service lines and sectors, TC Group provides both traditional accountancy and specialist business growth services, tailored to clients who can take advantage of any number of areas of expertise to meet the growing needs of their business.
Each specialist service has its own Service Line head and dedicated team, this is important to ensure they have the expertise to truly provide specialist support across each service line. They also have Client Service Directors (CSDs) and Client Relationship Managers (CSMs) in place who are responsible for forging and maintaining relationships with their clients. They recognise clients like one point of contact and the CSDs and CSMs provide this.
Stephen Watts, Managing Partner at TC Group, said:
“We know from various surveys we’ve done in the past that business owners value personal chemistry most in the relationship with their professional advisors, so having dedicated CSDs and CSMs in place helps foster this. We know running a business can be a lonely place, we’re business owners ourselves, and are therefore often the first point of contact for our clients. We recognise we need to build up trust early on and be able to provide the expertise to support them when our clients do come to us – the model we’ve crafted over time enables this.
“We have a very strong compliance offering across audit, accountancy, VAT, payroll, service charge accounting, tax, bookkeeping and company secretarial. In additional to these more traditional services we realised our clients often needed other advice around property, corporate finance and HR matters and we were referring them to outsourced services. There wasn’t a reason we couldn’t build those specialisms into our own service offering, across our offices in Northampton, Milton Keynes, Leicester, Hertford and Southampton and in doing so, giving the client a single point of contact. This is what we did and we’re now established with genuine credibility in the business advisory space.
“Our clients need us to share skills, knowledge and indeed our own experiences with them to enable them to grow their own businesses, ensure resilience, and ultimately exit with a capital sum. We’ve been on business growth programmes ourselves, most notably with Cranfield Business School in 2020, so we have a clear strategic direction as a business and plenty of real-life experiences to share. We want to work collaboratively with our clients for the lifecycle of their whole business, and to do this, we need to be able to advise them holistically, from a personal, business and tax perspective.”
Progressive, distinctive and courageous
It was this approach that attracted Chris Dell, Partner and Head of Brand, Creative and Culture, to the firm.
“What I was impressed with was the business owners’ journey and what challenges they’d faced,” he said. “They’d taken a different approach to what the firm looked like and the type of people it attracted and in turn, were able to build in-depth and authentic relationships with clients. This was a courageous move in what was (and in some cases, still is) a very traditional sector.
“It’s an approach you see more regularly now, but at the time, they were early adopters – probably the first in our respective market position to take that type of approach, that of accountants starting to adopt a genuine end-to-end business advisory role.”
TC Group has built a structure that takes a ‘people first’ approach within the business, how they work and how they can grow and develop their careers, backed up by a management team that live their values of being willing to try, willing to take risks, and yet are willing to fail but try again, something that will resonate with business owners reading this.
The ethos is based on a blueprint undertaken and implemented over a decade ago that came about from asking everyone in the business at the time what they thought was most important to them in how a business was run – this included areas such as leadership, communication, employee benefits and work life balance. Once everyone had ranked over 30 component parts, order of importance, the results underpinned a strategy for how the firm should be run and even today, this approach is constantly evolving.
A successful year
Chris Dell said:
“There can be a perception, when you undergo a merger, that you’ve just been taken over by a national firm and you’ll lose your identity, but that’s definitely not the case here. We’re still independent and maintain autonomy in doing things our way, but it’s been recognised that we have a lot to offer in terms of providing a valuable service to other firms within the wider TC Group. This is also reflected in Stephen now having a national role as Regional Managing Partner for the group.
“We’ve always had an appetite for engaging in best practice and working with key stakeholders, and that’s simply going to feed through into what we can provide for our clients as we continue to grow and develop along our own ambitious business journey.
“Our values of ‘Distinctive, Inclusive, Valuable, Courageous, Caring and Progressive’ guide us and shape our culture. They help us not only retain our best people but also attract new team members to the business.”
Stephen Watts added:
“We deliver a quarterly business review (QBR) which provides key updates to everyone in the business whilst at the same time, our board members openly answer all questions anyone might have.
“We also carry out a survey at each QBR on how likely someone would be to recommend TC Group to friends and family as a place to work and we’re very proud to score highly – it’s currently averaging around 8.4 out of 10 – a score many business owners would give their right arm to achieve. This means a lot to us because at the heart of this business is having a team that works together to support, share knowledge and advise business owners across all areas of their journey.
“We’ll continue to invest to make the business an enjoyable and rewarding environment, where everyone feels empowered, has the support to develop personally and where efforts are recognised and rewarded.
“I often say a lot of our client and people strategies are common sense but they’re not common practice. It’s effective leadership that makes them common practice and winning the hearts and minds of clients and colleagues alike is crucial to this.”
Sound advice many businesses would benefit from.
Find out more at the TC Group website or call 01604 746760.
