The view from Steve Leith FCCA

While at university, I did some work experience at Grant Thornton with a partner who became very supportive of me joining the firm. I applied; they rejected me. Not the best start. But I wrote to the partner and said, ‘If you think I’m a really good fit, can you rethink?’ Eventually, I joined GT and spent almost 20 years there.

While I was at GT, Sacha Romanovitch became CEO. She was a big influence on my early career, as was the partner who ran the team I joined in 2001 and worked with for 15 years.

Being part of a highly market-focused team kept the profession attractive to me. And the consistent exposure to how a partner operates in the market gave me a mould to follow in my role as a relationship partner today. It showed me how important connecting into the community of people in your sector is, and for the past 10 years I’ve been doing that in the tech space.

Cooper Parry has been dubbed ‘the rebels of accountancy’. We don’t do grey and we don’t do suits. Culture is at the heart of it all because happy, engaged, motivated people produce the best work for clients, and they always will.

We work with ambitious, high-growth, entrepreneurial businesses from hubs across the UK, but location is meaning less and less. We’ve been doing remote audits for a number of years now, and since the pandemic started we’ve shifted to ‘Working From Anywhere. Anytime. Forever’.

I’ve worked with clients on too many challenges to count, but the journey to making partner took me out of my comfort zone. When you work out how to differentiate yourself in an organisation that has its own strategies and priorities, spotting the market opportunity, you need to build a niche that will follow you for years to come – a platform not just to make partner, but to be successful after that. That starts with very small, deliberate, conscious steps, saying ‘This is where I want to be. This is what I want to do.’ There’s definitely an air of entrepreneurialism to it, seeing it, mapping it out. Without that I wouldn’t have got to partner at GT.

Joining Cooper Parry two weeks into lockdown #1 and onboarding as a partner remotely was a huge challenge, too. I enjoyed that joining phase, though, because I knew the cultural fit between myself and the business was strong. And I think that’s a key factor to think about for anyone, in any business. Do you see the world in the same way?

I think tech is impacting the accounting profession more slowly than people think. Sure, in the past five years you could point to collaboration software, remote working, data analytics and tools. But fundamentally, it’s still not changing the way accounting operates or the way audits are being done. We’re not going to be replaced by machines in the next 10 years. The tech might be going that fast, but the profession isn’t.

The profession is still seen in a particular light by the new generation of accountants, especially in the way practices treat their people. How does the profession think it’s going to attract Gen Z and future generations if it stays as it is? That question isn’t being asked enough. We need to strip away the old stereotypes, lead with a heavy focus on employee engagement and culture, and make practices places that people want to work at.

I believe we have to keep challenging the status quo in the profession, go beyond the stereotypes and inspire the next generation to want to be more than just ‘an accountant’.