Dedication Communication is what you need…

My son is currently obsessed with the Guinness book of records. Every day when I get home, he reads me a new record that he wants us to attempt to break …

Such as:

  • Fastest time to wrap a person in newspaper
  • Fastest balloons burst by sitting in 30 seconds
  • Most 500-ml bottles balanced on one finger
  • Fastest 100m on a space hopper

We always fail but we have fun trying. All of these are real records, by the way, check out the Guinness records website for kids

Whenever I think of the Guinness World Records though, I think back to my childhood and the late, great Roy Castle with his catchphrase ‘dedication is what you need‘; he was right of course.

Similarly, like Roy, I have my own catchphrase; ‘communication is what you need‘ if you want to be an effective accountant.

Communication makes such a huge difference to the relationship between clients and accountants. I learned this many years ago when I first started out.

When I started Accsys Accountants I used to work alone and had to leave the office unmanned for extended periods whilst I visited clients. After one such day, I got a panicky email from a new client who dropped in on my office the day after signing up with me to find all the lights off and the place deserted.

He couldn’t raise me on the phone either because I was in a meeting and he immediately thought I had disappeared off of the face of the planet. We laugh about it now but he was genuinely concerned.

If only I had communicated with him to let him know that the office is occasionally unmanned, he would have been calmed. If I had put in place a simple call answering service, things would have been much different.

Since that day, we put communication at the front of everything we do. It makes such a difference. We can all be in danger of thinking because you know something, everyone else should know it too and many accountants cause their clients grief by just not being available, not responding and not communicating.

So I say, if you want to be a great accountant – ‘communication is what you need’.