What are we really striving to achieve?

Today our very own Will Farnell, talks about what we are striving to achieve when it comes to business. This blog first appeared in International Accountant Magazine.

I remember when in 2007 I decided I wanted to set up an accounting firm. I knew like many business owners – as that’s how I saw myself – rather than an accounting practice owner, that I needed to have a USP or point of difference. What I realise some 16 years on is that I had more than a simple USP, I had a real clarity of purpose.

Like everything, the business world in which we now operate has changed. Even in the 16 years of running my firm Farnell Clarke, a short period of time, we have seen huge change. Despite this huge change much of the market is still working out how to keep up. The opportunities for accounting firms and any business to that point to change, evolve and prosper remains significant.

I spend much of my time today talking to audiences of accountants around the world and these conversations have historically been about technology, process, and business change. Interestingly the needle has shifted and many more of these conversations are now about the human side of what we do as accountants. In the last couple of years, it has been vision, values, culture, generational shift and what this means for employers and clients alike. Most recently however it has been centred firmly around purpose. Why do we do what we do, what are we REALLY striving to achieve. For me, in my own firm, it is only in the last couple of years that I have been able to directly correlate the clarity of purpose for my own firm with the apparent success we have had as a firm.

This was not deliberate, I’m not that clever, but it underlines the power of purpose and the power of clarity of goals, objectives and the things that really matter to us in business beyond profit and shareholder return. My own view is that this will in the coming years be critical for all businesses in attracting and retaining the best talent from a pool of millennial, GenZ and ultimately GenAlpha cohorts.

I was hugely excited at the prospect of what technology could do for the accounting profession back in 2007/07 when we began to look at how we could reinvent our business by blending the best people and the best processes with the right technology. We have lived through the evolution of the cloud accounting world and related app eco-system.

As we see AI and tools like ChatGPT spark a debate on the future of our roles, one thing is for sure. I am as excited today about the power of human – human relationships, human empathy – all those things that AI cannot yet deliver as I was about the emergence of cloud accounting 16 years ago. There is no better time to be an accountant!

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