The welcoming comfort blanket of practice can be hard to shrug off and few would want to with the salaries and rewards that are on offer even before you reach the holy grail of partner.

But what if you're blessed - or cursed - with a buccaneering spirit and are thinking of blazing a trail outside a firm? That niggling voice in the back of your mind that says you were meant to do great things, but not in a practice environment?

If you fit the description then you could do a lot worse than follow Nigel Layton's example.

The managing director of Quest, which has been tasked with the audit of The Football Association's 2008 transfers, has always known where his true path lay and never settled for second best, no matter how rosy the future seemed.

He always planned to run his own business, so he cut his teeth in the accountancy profession at PricewaterhouseCoopers after gaining his degree. 'It was a great place to be, great training and great people,' he says. 'It gave me the wherewithal to do what I'm doing now.'

At PwC, Layton had five successful years in audit before moving into corporate recovery, earning his spurs on what he describes as 'the insolvency case of the decade'. Few would accuse Layton of hyperbole in giving the Robert Maxwell affair that particular tag.

He spent three years searching through the murky world of international tax havens trying to find out where the $3bn taken from Maxwell's creditors had been salted away.

'That was fantastic experience for investigations and I really enjoyed that type of work,' says Layton.

For most, making partner is the pinnacle of achievement, but Layton has never been one to follow the herd.

After 11 years at PwC, he was on his way to the accountancy top table, but he says: 'I always had the view that I wanted to go into business for myself. Anyway, once you make it to junior partner, it's like getting to number 99 in Snakes and Ladders and then having to start again at number 2.'

The reaction from his family was understandable: 'My father said "You're mad! What are you doing? PwC's a job for life"'.

That's not to say it was all plain sailing when Quest was still in the fledgling stages of its growth. Layton and his partners had contacts across the globe from their time on the Maxwell case, but for an industry where discretion is wielded more like a sledgehammer than a sabre, getting the word out was tough.

'We had a lucky break Ð we picked up our first major client by cold mailing,' he says.

Quest sent out a pitch to 500 FDs. One of them passed it on to his internal auditor and the rest was history. 'The company is still a client to this day,' says Layton.

Pile on the pressure

One of the company's most lucrative service lines is its fraud investigations at blue-chip companies where young professionals are under enormous pressure to perform. 'There is more and more pressure on staff if they want to get their bonuses. There's a greater amount at stake, so there's more scope for wrongdoing.'

The company is currently going from strength to strength, but one of Layton's most valuable talents is knowing when to 'stick' and when to 'twist'.

Quest is starting to reap the reputational rewards of getting the FA as a client. 'We're seeing bigger and bigger jobs coming through, so we have an exit timeline of three to five years.'

Layton offers one key nugget of advice to those wanting to progress Ð don't rush it.

'Find yourself a mentor and learn from them. You can't do it too quickly. Bide your time and wait for your opportunities. I was at PwC for 11 years and I was still learning when I left. Yes, it was a bit of a risk and a big jump, but there was a part of me that said "Let's have a go because if I don't have a go now, I never will."'